Gilles Lermet has had enough: enough of 45 years of work, enough of the interminable left-right cycle of French politics about to start again in next month’s presidential election, enough of cars being set alight by hooligans on the street, enough of the shortage of doctors, of declining public services and of immigration.
“There are too many migrants,” he says from behind the counter of his bar in La Ricamarie in the industrial valley of the L’Ondaine river that joins the Loire near Saint-Etienne, mirroring the complaints of France’s far right. “It’s not that they take our jobs, because there aren’t any. But we have to pay for them.”
La Ricamarie is the kind of post-industrial town where the liberal president Emmanuel Macron and other establishment politicians from centre-left to centre-right are scorned by residents living with the bitter legacy of poverty, unemployment and bad housing left by the closure of coal mines and factories since the 1970s.