Amid abandoned coal mines and a soon-to-be-shuttered engine plant, a shiny new factory rises like a phoenix over Billy-Berclau, a small industrial town in northern France. Inside, 700 newly hired workers are making next-generation electric vehicle batteries for the Automotive Cells Company—part of a grand project to revive the faltering fortunes of the wider region.
ONE “Pin Valley” is emerging here from the remains of industries that closed in the wake of globalization. Three more giant electric car battery factories are expected to open by 2026, a testament to the re-industrialisation strategy that President Emmanuel Macron’s government has touted as an antidote to the far right. National Congress Partyhas won much support in areas hit hard by job losses.
“Industry is a weapon against the national protest movement, because in places where anger has risen, we are restoring hope,” Roland Lescure, Mr Macron’s deputy industry minister, said earlier this year.
But the bet didn’t pay off politically. Billy-Berclau and nearly every other town in the Pas-de-Calais region gave the National Rally a landslide victory in last week’s parliamentary elections — a trend that is likely to be repeated in Sunday’s final round of voting.
“There is a sense of disconnect,” said André Kuchcinski, president of the Artois-Flandres Industrial Zone, a 1,100-acre area where Automotive Cells, known as ACC, is expanding its new factory. “You have a government that promotes development and job creation, but a lot of people are still struggling and feel insecure,” he said. “A new factory doesn’t solve that problem, but there is a feeling that the far right will solve that problem.”
Around Billy-Berclau, people whispered about an impending political earthquake.
“There were thousands of jobs. The new factory is just a fraction of the jobs that have been lost,” said Marc Vandamme, 54, a home health nurse, sipping a beer at Europe Cafe, a local hangout where people buy lottery tickets or have a cup of coffee before going to work.
“People feel defeated and angry,” Mr. Vandamme said. “The cost of everything keeps going up, and they’re worried about immigration,” he said. “The Nationals promised to fix all that, and a lot of people are saying, give them a chance to run things.”
The Battery Valley initiative is supposed to address such concerns. Pas-de-Calais, a former mining region that stretches from the flat plains around Billy-Berclau to Dunkirk on the coast and on to the Belgian border, has gone through painful cycles of industrial decline and rebirth since the end of World War II.
Pas-de-Calais tended to vote for Communist or left-leaning candidates representing workers’ rights before shifting to more centrist politicians in the early 2000s. In the 2012 presidential election, Socialist François Hollande won more than half the vote.
But by then, globalization had begun to take hold. For decades, tire makers, steel mills, and paint plants, as well as French automakers Renault and Peugeot (now part of Stellantis after merging with Italian automaker Fiat), had been moving production to lower-cost countries to compete with cheaper rivals from Eastern Europe and Asia.
Marine Le Pen, the far-right candidate of what was then known as the National Front, capitalized on the unrest. She rebranded the party’s image, long associated with overt racism, anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial, as one of Workers are protected and purchasing powerShe campaigned heavily in towns across France that were losing jobs to globalization—particularly in Pas-de-Calais, where she set up her constituency office to appeal to working-class voters.
By the time Mr Macron ran for president in 2017, nearly 40,000 industrial jobs had disappeared from the region. Ms Le Pen won 52 percent of the vote in Pas-de-Calais that year, nearly double Mr Macron’s share. She won 57 percent of the vote in the 2022 presidential election.
Mr Macron, a former defender of globalization, has moved to a new priority: re-industrializing France with “future technologies”. In Battery Valley, Taiwan’s ProLogium is set to open a battery factory, along with two others involving French and international investors. A series of new battery recycling plants will also be built. Mr Macron said 20,000 direct jobs would be created over the next decade, with many more indirect ones.
Inside ACC, which is jointly owned by Stellantis, Mercedes and TotalEnergies, some are clinging to Mr Macron’s promise of a better future. The eight-foot-field plant, which opened last summer, has received about €840 million ($910 million) in state subsidies. The plant, located on a site once dominated by Française de Mécanique, a Stellantis subsidiary that makes internal combustion engines, has been downsized to about 1,400 workers, down from 6,000 at its peak. As it continues to downsize, ACC has pledged to take on 700 of its former employees.
Among them is Christophe Lequimme, 52, who built car engines for 22 years before being retrained by ACC to work with automotive lithium batteries.
Billy-Berclau’s precarious fortunes can be traced back to his family, starting with his grandfather, who lost his job at the mines when they closed in the 1960s, but found work at Française de Mécanique. Mr. Lequimme’s father and mother spent their careers at the same plant, and Mr. Lequimme followed in their footsteps. When the layoffs came, he jumped at the chance to work at ACC.
“This is a great opportunity for a fresh start,” he said.
But that optimism has yet to spread to the community at large.
In last weekend’s parliamentary elections, Bruno Bilde, a local politician from the National Rally party close to Ms Le Pen, won nearly 60 percent of the vote, defeating his main rival Steve Bossart, the center-left mayor of Billy-Berclau.
Mr. Bilde declined an interview request. But in the run-up to the election, he has been actively courting voters at the ACC plant, posting a photo on X of him with a group of supporters waving National Rally leaflets. “Thank you for your welcome,” he wrote, adding: “National Rally is the leading party for the working people!”
Such talk worries ACC officials. Matthieu Hubert, the company’s general secretary, notes that the National Rally has painted electric cars as cars for the elite, and that the company’s platform calls for an end to the European Union’s ban on gasoline-powered cars starting in 2035, a ban designed to combat climate change.
“I can’t say it doesn’t worry me,” said Mr. Hubert, adding that European automakers are racing to get ahead of their Asian and American rivals by making cleaner cars, taking over supply chains and making batteries. “This factory represents the future.”
For Billy-Berclau mayor Bossart, the rise of the far right in a region where billions of dollars in new investment are pouring in is a paradox that goes beyond economics.
“We have a lot of people who own their own homes, who have good pensions. People have jobs and unemployment is low,” said Mr Brossart, 28, who was born in Billy-Berclau. “And we are attracting big investments like the ACC plant.”
Despite this, locals are increasingly concerned about a sense of insecurity, despite the town being crime-free like larger cities. But television news programmes regularly show images of migrants in Calais near the English Channel and link them to reports of crime, stoking anxiety.
There is also a sense that Mr Macron is out of touch and does not understand their struggles, Mr Brossart said. They are angry that he raised the retirement age from 62 to 64 and feel he has not done enough to address the cost of living crisis, including high energy bills that the National Rally has promised to reduce.
“The area is more attractive than ever to investors,” said Bossart. “But people’s anger has been building. As soon as they could vote, they expressed their desperation.”
Segolène Le Stradic Reporting contributed by Billy-Berclau.
