In 'Melinda's' family – it is not her real name – they have voted for the far-right Le Pen family for three generations. The first to do so was her grandfather Pierre, a farmer near Hirson in the impoverished north-east of the Picardy region in northern France. Having long voted socialist, he switched allegiance to Jean-Marie Le Pen's Front National in 1988.
But now, for the first time, an internecine war within France's far-right is dividing the family. “We're normally all for Marine Le Pen, but at the moment we're hesitating,” admits Melinda, 39, who is currently jobless and whose entitlement to unemployment benefit will soon come to an end.
Like her mother and her uncle, she is currently leaning towards the other far-right candidate in the French presidential election, polemicist Éric Zemmour, even though the first round of voting is not until Sunday April 10th, and they have not yet made their final decision. Her two cousins, Dylan and Kevin, as well as their partners, remain loyal to Marine Le Pen, the Rassemblement National candidate.
In this rural corner of the département or county of Aisne, where most farms are dairy farms, the unemployment rate is close to three times that the French average.
Melinda's wider family is scattered across various small villages a few kilometres apart, all close to the former family home at Moulin-des-Houyes in the village of Wattigny, where the property which had once belonged to Melinda's great-grandparents had to be sold. Today the generation of family members in their thirties find it hard to make ends meet, and see their family's history as one of gradual decline.
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“My grandparents said that you could live well on the minimum wage at that time, even with four children. Now we all depend on it for eveything,” said Dylan, aged 24, a farm worker who is retraining to become a lorry driver. As for Melinda, a slight figure who recently got divorced, she and her nine-year-old son have recently returned to live with her mother because she could not afford to pay rent on her own.
Yet her great uncle was a primary school headteacher, mayor of his village and also a councillor sitting on the département council. “His brother, my grandfather, studied but the time came when he had to take over the family farm,” said Melinda, who said that he ended up living on a pension of 500 euros a month.
“They were socialists but it was the socialism of another era. There was a side based on social issues but it also had a Catholic side to it,” recalled Melinda. “For them, work was the most important thing. My grandfather was in favour of social justice but not over-the-top justice.” Melinda said that from the start of socialist president François Mitterrand's first term of office in 1981 her grandfather had become worried about the abuse of the welfare system and was not happy at the abolition of the death penalty – a move he felt paved the way to greater criminality.
“In the family we're all in favour of the death penalty,” said Melinda, who sees Zemmour as “stricter than Marine Le Pen when it comes to cracking down on crime, and immigration too. She's trying to be popular because she was demonised but I think that you shouldn't soften your ideas too much.”
“Marine le Pen is doing a bit too much on social issues. There are quite enough people who expect things to be done for them as it is,” said her uncle Gérald, 52, who works as an accountant in one of the rare metalworking companies in the area. In the past a loyal Le Pen supporter, he greeted Éric Zemmour's candidacy in the autumn with relief. Since her debate against Emmanuel Macron in the second round of the 2017 presidential election “when Marine so disappointed us”, his belief in the Rassemblement National (RN) candidate has never fully returned. In any case, he thinks that Éric Zemmour is stronger and more likely to stand up to Emmanuel Macron in a face-to-face debate.
Zemmour's pro-Putin stance in the past does not worry him either. “Ukraine was Russia not so long ago,” claimed Gérald. The family is also indifferent to the allegations of sexual violence made against Zemmour, and revealed by Mediapart, which they do not believe. Their support for Zemmour is partly based on a liking for his “values”. Melinda said: “We're from a conservative family with traditional values. A family is a man and a woman who are made in order to have children.”
Melinda, who worked as a legal adviser at an association for the disabled, said that “homosexuality was a criminal offence until the 1980s and now it's publicised all the time in films, TV series … soon heterosexuals will be marginalised.” She added: “When I hear that [the] Miss France [competition] is going to have transsexuals but not single mothers: we're deviating from human nature.”
She says Marine Le Pen “should have made it clear when she said that she wants to support single parent families. We don't really know if she's speaking about men: and that's pushing us towards Éric Zemmour,” added Melinda, who believes the RN candidate has not spoke enough about traditional values.
Melinda used to give courses on the law and the economy at a technical college and says she was annoyed that the establishment “planned something for [the Muslim festival] Eid but nothing for Catholic festivals”. Once again, she had the feeling that she was becoming a minority.
Though tempted by Zemmour, Melinda says she does like the new generation of Rassemblement National figures such as Jordan Bardella, Julien Odoul and Aleksandar Nikolic, who are clean-cut, smart and omnipresent on the 24-hour news channels. “I can identify with them,” said Melinda, who first came across Zemmour by chance one day on the news station CNews “a channel that I didn't watch that much”. She added: “I immediately thought that he was telling the truth.” She and her mother then began regularly watching the polemicist, who was also a commentator for the conservative Le Figaro newspaper, during his appearances on CNews, a channel owned by French businessman Vincent Bolloré.
Melinda's mother, Corinne, agrees about Zemmour. “He speaks candidly, he doesn't allow himself to be unsettled by criticism.” For years she worked alongside her husband on the farm, but this work was not officially recognised when she divorced him. Today she says she likes Zemmour's talk about “meritocracy” in schools. “Because nowadays they give the bac [editor's note, the baccalauréat exam is equivalent to A levels or the high school diploma] to anyone,” she claimed. Corinne is also open to the candidate's proposals on extending the scope of legitimate self-defence because “our justice system has become far too lenient”. Zemmour has suggested that the legal principle of proportionality should be done away with when it comes to acting in self-defence, and that people should have the “right to fight back against thugs”.
Might the opinion polls - which show Marine Le Pen considerably ahead of Éric Zemmour - change Corinne's mind ahead of the first round of voting in the election on Sunday April 10th? Le Pen is currently favourite to go through to the decisive second round along with Emmanuel Macron. “Certainly not,” she retorted, while questioning, too, whether the polls which put Macron so far ahead are really to be trusted.
Her nephew Dylan, who lives with his wife around 30 kilometres away, says he will stay “loyal to Marine”. Having spent eight years working on a dairy and arable farm, he is retraining as a lorry driver like his brother Kevin “who works fewer hours and earns more” than him. His boss, who has a herd of 110 dairy cows, was no longer able to get by financially, he said. “With the price of [agricultural] diesel going through the roof....with the price of milk,” Dylan explained. He is critical of an agricultural system that he says works back to front. “We send our meat abroad and here we eat rubbish. French livestock farming will come to an end one day,” he predicted.
After eight years of tough work earning the minimum wage, things had become “terrible”, he said, listing the household's expenditure and highlighting the fact that it was impossible to buy any extras. “Look at pasta alone; when I set up home with my wife I remember that it was 93 cents a kilo. Today it's €1.30.” He explained: “My grandparents taught me to keep track of prices like that.”
His wife, who drives an ambulance and has to put up with irregular hours and long days, often does not even earn the minimum wage. She, too, will vote again for Marine Le Pen in the election.
“I know people on welfare, with their four children and benefits, who are on more than us,” said Dylan. He thinks Le Pen's plan to exonerate workers under 30 from paying tax is an excellent idea, and is seemingly unconcerned that this measure will benefit comfortably-off young people as well as those who are struggling.
What about voting for a candidate on the Left? Out of the question as far as he is concerned. “[Radical-left candidate Jean-Luc] Mélenchon should be put in a retirement home. Taking in every migrant is just nonsense,” said the young man. But while he considers that Zemmour talks “a lot of truth”, he acknowledges that he can also “create fear” in people. “He has a bit of a fascist side to him, like Jean-Marie Le Pen did, and that worries me.”
Dylan also thinks that Zemmour does not represent the ordinary working classes, citing the candidate's plan to push back the age of retirement from the current 62. “If he came from an ordinary family I don't think he'd have talked about a retirement age of 63,” he said. Dylan went with his father to see Marine Le Pen at a rally in the northern city of Reims and likes her local campaigning approach. “The only person that I see going to all the regions is Marine Le Pen. [Zemmour] hasn't done that.”
But despite the family divisions over which far-right candidate to vote for in the first round of the presidential election on April 10th, they will be united around one aim for the second and decisive round on Sunday April 24th - “beating Macron”.
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- The original French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Michael Streeter