Beaucaire, closed village. At the entrance to the arenas of the small town of Gard, Saturday September 16, the security service of the National Rally (RN) regulates access. The Lepéniste village welcomes the party’s political return as part of its Estivales, a program of events which punctuates the Beaucair summer, and has been doing so since well before its conquest by the extreme right.
On the banks of the Rhône, the mix of genres is accepted: the mayor, Julien Sanchez, a frontist who presents well, wants to establish the city he has led since 2014 as a showcase for the flame party. A success: in 2020, he was re-elected in the first round of municipal elections and is careful not to touch taxes, regardless of the lack of maintenance of the water network or the old buildings in the center. Reason why he took it very badly an investigation of Releasethis week, on its omnipotent and sometimes clannish management.
To add rhythm to the day, he contacted local associations, particularly those which maintain Provençal traditions – he likes to say that here, we are proud to be French and we defend traditions. The associations hesitated: to go or not? What if the municipal subsidy depended on it? They played the game, sometimes at the cost of volunteer resignations. In Beaucaire, the associative and political fabric is withering away. Around fifty opponents gathered in a square in the old town, where the large South American seasonal workforce is housed. A table of parliamentary attachés in their Sunday best laughs; today, the city is theirs.
A Le Pen – Bardella “ticket”?
Behind the Estivales fence, a mini-Festival of “L’Huma” with RN sauce. Two Spanish guitars play Bella Ciao, the anthem of resistance to Italian fascism, the one from which the National Front borrowed its flame, in 1972; federations sell their local specialty, including the wine of the deputy (RN) of Gironde Grégoire de Fournas, whose sales and popularity to the most radical far right have jumped since he, in session at the Assembly national, shouted “Let him return to Africa”.
Politics hides in corners. Under the tent of the Hemera Campus, the training organization for Lepénist executives, where two conferences are given on “assimilation, a principle in crisis” And “political philosophy and militant action” ; in this discussion between two RN parliamentarians, who are annoyed that “the LGBT lobby has hijacked the rainbow, even though a rainbow is pretty” ; or at the RN group stand at the European Parliament, where a handful of sympathizers listen to their representatives denounce “Big Pharma”, “the Brussels technocratic empire” Or “the gravediggers of European agriculture”.
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