Le Pen’s hard right looks set to crush Macron’s centrists

Market day, and more people are queuing to buy lottery tickets at the Café du Centre than freshly dug carrots and spinach at the farm stall. “People here watch their budgets,” says a fresh-produce seller: “They prefer to shop at the discount store.” Once, this red-brick northern town of some 3,000 people thrived on the back of a big jute-weaving and textiles factory, opened in 1857. Today, Flixecourt has a poverty rate of 19%, nearly five points above the national average. Squeezed finances and disillusion are pushing voters to the extremes. On a recent weekend, ahead of elections on June 9th to the European Parliament, the only two candidates whose posters were visible in the town were Jordan Bardella and Marion Maréchal, rivals from the nationalist hard right.