The Power of Le Pen

Win or Lose,france's Populist Has Alread Shaken Up Her Country.

- Vivienne Walt

PATRICE SINOQUET LOVES THE UNITED States of America. In this bleak corner of northern France, he stands out in his Harley-Davidson jacket, his arms tattooed with Old Glory and a Route 66 sign. But Sinoquet’s fondness for the U.S. took a jolt earlier this year, when his Michigan-based employer, Whirlpool Corp., announced that it was shutting its factory here and moving production to Poland. Workers there earn significantly less than their French counterparts and have less robust benefits and protections, yet Poland conveniently sits within the European Union’s borderless, tariff-free zone.

“This is the story today in France,” says Sinoquet, 54, who started working at the plant at age 20 and met his wife and many of his friends on the assembly line. “Since 2000, we workers have been thrown out like Kleenex,” he adds, sitting in the reception area of the factory. “And since 2008, there have been no jobs. Here in France there is no work, no enterprises.”

Sinoquet’s grim assessment is echoed across France’s old industrial heartland, an area that spans some 200 miles near the Belgian border. Much as voters in the rusting factory towns of Ohio, Pennsylvania and Michigan helped Donald Trump defeat the Establishment in the U.S. last year, the French living in these neglected “departments” threaten to torpedo the dual-party establishment that has governed France for generations, and send a shock through the rest of Europe too.