Amid abandoned coal mines and a soon-to-close engine factory, a gleaming new factory soars like a phoenix over Billy-Berclau, a small industrial town in northern France. Inside, 700 newly hired workers are making batteries for next-generation electric vehicles for the Automotive Cells Company — part of a grand project to revive the region’s flagging fortunes.
A “Battery Valley” is emerging here from the remains of industries shuttered during a wave of globalization. Three more giant electric car battery factories are expected to open by 2026, evidence of a reindustrialization strategy that President Emmanuel Macron’s government has touted as an antidote to the far-right Rassemblement National party, which has gained ground in areas decimated by job losses.
“Industry is a weapon against the National Rally, because in places where anger has risen, we restore hope,” Roland Lescure, Macron's deputy industry minister, said earlier this year.
But the bet isn’t paying off politically. Billy-Berclau and almost every other town in this Pas-de-Calais region gave National Rally a resounding victory in last week’s legislative elections — a trend that is likely to repeat in a final round of voting on Sunday.
“There is a sense of disconnect,” said André Kuchcinski, president of the Artois-Flandres Industrial Park, a more than 1,100-acre area where the Automotive Cells Company, known as ACC, is expanding its new factory. “You have a government that is pushing for development and job creation, but many people are still struggling and feeling insecure,” he said. “A new factory is not going to solve that, but there is a sense that the far right is.”
Around Billy-Berclau, there is soft talk about an impending political earthquake.
“There used to be thousands more jobs. The new factory is just a fraction of the jobs that have been lost,” said Marc Vandamme, 54, a home health nurse, as he sipped a beer at the Europe Cafe, a local hangout where people buy lottery tickets or grab a coffee before work.
“People are feeling defeated and angry,” Mr Vandamme said. “The cost of everything keeps going up and they are also worried about immigration,” he said. “The National Rally promises to fix all that and many are saying let's give them a chance to run things.”
The Battery Valley initiative is intended to address such concerns. Pas-de-Calais, a former mining region stretching from the flat plains around Billy-Berclau to Dunkirk on the coast and towards the Belgian border, has experienced painful cycles of industrial decline and rebirth since the end of World War II.
Pas-de-Calais, which is heavily unionized, tended to vote for communist or left-wing candidates representing workers' rights before switching to more centrist politicians in the early 2000s. In the 2012 presidential election, François Hollande, a Socialist, won more than half the vote.
But then globalization began to bite. For decades, tire makers, steel and paint factories, and even French automakers Renault and Peugeot (now part of Stellantis after a merger with Italian automaker Fiat) had been moving production to lower-cost countries to combat cheaper competition from Eastern Europe and Asia.
Marine Le Pen, the far-right candidate for the movement then called the Front National, capitalized on the malaise. She transformed the party’s image, long associated with overt racism, anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial, into one that stood up for workers and purchasing power. She campaigned fiercely in cities across France that had lost jobs to globalization — particularly in Pas-de-Calais, where she set up her polling station to appeal to working-class voters.
By the time Macron ran for the 2017 French presidential election, nearly 40,000 manufacturing jobs had disappeared from the region. Le Pen won 52 percent of the vote in Pas-de-Calais that year, almost twice as many as Macron. In the 2022 presidential election, she won 57 percent of the vote.
Mr. Macron, who once championed globalization, has shifted to a new priority: reindustrializing France with “technologies of the future.” In Battery Valley, Taiwan’s ProLogium is expected to open a battery factory, along with two others with French and international investors. A series of new electric battery recycling plants will also be built. Mr. Macron says 20,000 direct jobs will be created there over the next decade, and as many indirect ones.
Within ACC, which is co-owned by Stellantis, Mercedes and TotalEnergies, some are clinging to Macron’s promise of a better future. The factory, which opened last summer and is eight football fields long, has received about 840 million euros ($910 million) in state subsidies. The plant sits on a site once dominated by Française de Mécanique, a Stellantis subsidiary that makes internal combustion engines, which has been scaled back to about 1,400 workers from 6,000 at its peak. As the plant continues to wind down, ACC has pledged to hire 700 of its former workers.
One of them is Christophe Lequimme, 52, who built car engines for 22 years before being retrained by ACC to work on lithium-ion batteries for cars.
Billy-Berclau's faltering fortunes ran through his family, beginning with his grandfather, who lost his job in the mines when they closed in the 1960s but found work at Française de Mécanique. Mr. Lequimme's father and mother spent their careers in the same factory, and Mr. Lequimme followed in their footsteps. When the redundancies came, he jumped at the chance to join ACC.
“It's a great opportunity for a new beginning,” he said.
But this optimism was not echoed in the wider community.
In last weekend’s parliamentary elections, Bruno Bilde, a local Rassemblement National politician close to Ms Le Pen, won nearly 60 percent of the vote, beating his main rival, Steve Bossart, the center-left mayor of Billy-Berclau.
Mr. Bilde declined requests for an interview. But in the run-up to the election, he was actively canvassing voters at the ACC factory, posting a photo on X of himself with a group of supporters waving National Rally leaflets. “Thank you for your welcome,” he wrote, adding: “The National Rally is the leading party for workers!”
Such talk makes officials at ACC nervous. Matthieu Hubert, the company’s secretary general, noted that National Rally has branded electric vehicles as cars for the elite and that the platform calls for an end to a European Union ban on gas-powered vehicles from 2035, which is designed to combat climate change.
“I can’t say it doesn’t worry me,” Mr. Hubert said, adding that European automakers are racing to stay ahead of Asian and American rivals by producing cleaner vehicles, retooling supply chains and building batteries. “This plant represents the future.”
For the mayor of Billy-Berclau, Mr Bossart, the rise of the far right in a region where billions in new investment are pouring in is a paradox that goes beyond the economy.
“We have a lot of people who own their own homes, who have a decent pension. People have jobs and there is little unemployment,” said Mr Bossart, 28, who was born in Billy-Berclau. “And we are attracting big investments, like the ACC factory.”
Yet local residents had become increasingly concerned about a sense of insecurity, even though the city did not have the crime of larger cities. But television news programmes regularly show images of migrants in Calais, near the English Channel, and link them to reports of crime, fuelling concerns.
There was also a sense that Mr Macron was out of touch and did not understand their problems, Mr Bossart said. They were angry that he had raised the retirement age from 62 to 64 and felt he had not done enough to tackle a cost-of-living crisis, including high energy bills that the National Rally has pledged to reduce.
“This region is more attractive than ever for investors,” Mr. Bossart said. “But people’s anger has increased. As soon as they can vote, they show their desperation.”
Segolène Le Stradic contributed to Billy-Berclau's reporting.
