When the votes for France's snap parliamentary elections were being counted, they had to repeat the name of a Rassemblement National (RN, far right) party candidate dozens of times. They had already had to do so in 2022, in 2017, etc. Each time, more far-right votes were added. For years now, rural mayors have endured the rise of the far right and tried to stem the tide.

Claudie Faucon Mejean, the Parti Socialiste (PS, left) mayor of Bram, population 3,300, in the southern French department of Aude, has never gotten used to it. While Marine Le Pen's party failed at the final step to seizing power, the three incumbent RN MPs in her department, a historically left-wing wine-growing region of the “red” south of France, once again pulled off a complete victory. "It's hard, really tough. I shed a few tears," she said. Continuously re-elected as her town's mayor since 2011, she had been struck by the widening gap between local and national levels: "The same people who gave me 72% in the first round of the municipal elections say to me 'you know we're with you, it's great what you're doing, but we're voting [RN leader] Bardella because we're fed up.'" They then repeat the infamous phrase: "We haven't tried it yet," meaning a far-right government.

"It's not against you, Gilles, but this can't go on any longer: All we do is pay, the lazy people, we're fed up," is also what Gilles Noël, left-wing mayor of the town of Varzy and president of the rural mayors association of the Nièvre department in Burgundy, has been hearing. On July 7, the historic constituency of former Socialist president Mitterrand also fell to the RN. Far-right MP Julien Guibert was elected with 54.8% of the vote, against Christian Paul, a PS figure who had been nominated as the party's candidate by its management, against the wishes of the local PS federation, which had another candidate. The result was a local political earthquake and confirmation that no territory can resist the RN.

Aware that their own actions were not at issue in this national-scale election, local elected representatives have nonetheless taken it hard. They see themselves as beacons and bulwarks of the French republic amid a torn political climate. "We rural mayors are at a loss, we don't know what to do," said Noël. "We say to ourselves, 'How on earth can I continue to work on [fostering social cohesion] if I can't find the words to get my constituents to take a step back and reconsider their vote?"

"For us, it's a double penalty: We already had the RN, and we don't benefit from the republican surge that has taken place elsewhere," said Faucon Mejean. She knows all about the "competition of miseries" that the RN exploits, being in a region that is among the poorest in France and one that hosts a large immigrant workforce. The elected representative spares no effort to improve people's daily life with the means at her disposal: €1 school meals, subsidized water rates, bicycles for children, help with driving licenses, etc. "And you can't say that Bram is an abandoned municipality. We've got a freeway exit, a train station, all the services we need, and even a few doctors."

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