Amidst abandoned coal mines and an engine plant that is about to close, a gleaming new factory looms like a phoenix over Billy-Berclau, a small industrial town in northern France. Inside, 700 newly hired workers are making state-of-the-art electric vehicle batteries for the Automotive Cells Company, part of a major project to revive the broader region’s faltering fortunes.
Here, a “battery valley” is emerging from the wreckage of industries that closed during a wave of globalization. Three more giant electric-car battery plants are expected to open by 2026, a testament to a reindustrialization strategy that President Emmanuel Macron’s government has heralded as an antidote to the far-right National Rally 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 grown, we are restoring hope,” Roland Lescure, Macron’s deputy industry minister, said earlier this year.
But the gamble is not paying off politically. Billy-Berclau and almost all the other towns in the Pas-de-Calais region gave the National Rally a resounding victory in the parliamentary elections last week, a trend that will probably be repeated in the final round of voting on Sunday.
“There is a sense of disconnection,” said André Kuchcinski, president of the Artois-Flandres Industrial Park, an area covering more than 1,100 acres where Automotive Cells Company, known as ACC, is expanding its new plant. “We have a government that has pushed for development and job creation, but many 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 does.”
There is whispered talk around Billy Berclau that a political earthquake is brewing.
“There used to be thousands more jobs. The new factory only makes up for a fraction of those lost,” said Marc Vandamme, 54, a home care nurse, over a beer at the Europe Café, a local hangout where people buy lottery tickets or grab a coffee before heading to work.
“People are feeling defeated and angry,” 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 of that and many say they should be given a chance to handle things.”
The Battery Valley initiative was supposed to address those concerns. Pas-de-Calais, a former mining area stretching from the plains around Billy-Berclau to Dunkirk on the coast and towards the Belgian border, has seen harrowing cycles of industrial decline and rebirth since the end of World War II.
A heavily unionised district, Pas-de-Calais tended to vote for communist or left-wing candidates representing workers’ rights before shifting in the early 2000s to support more centrist politicians. In the 2012 presidential election, Socialist François Hollande won more than half the vote.
But by then, globalization had already begun to take its toll. For decades, tire makers, steel and paint plants, as well as French carmakers Renault and Peugeot (now part of Stellantis after a merger with Italian carmaker Fiat) had been moving production to lower-cost countries to fight off cheaper competition from Eastern Europe and Asia.
Marine Le Pen, the far-right candidate of the movement then called the National Front, capitalized on the unrest. She revamped the image of the party, which had long been associated with overt racism, anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial, into one that stood up for workers and purchasing power. She campaigned fiercely in towns across France that had lost jobs to globalization, especially in Pas-de-Calais, where she set up her electoral office to appeal to working-class voters.
By the time Macron ran for president in France in 2017, nearly 40,000 more manufacturing jobs had disappeared from the region. Le Pen won 52 percent of the vote in Pas-de-Calais that year, almost double the number Macron won. In the 2022 presidential election, she won 57 percent of the vote.
Once a champion of globalisation, Macron has moved on to a new priority: reindustrialising France with “technologies of the future”. In Battery Valley, Taiwanese company ProLogium is expected to open a battery plant, along with two others involving French and international investors. A series of new electric battery recycling plants will also be built. Macron says 20,000 direct jobs will be created over the next decade, with as many indirect ones.
At ACC, which is co-owned by Stellantis, Mercedes and TotalEnergies, some are clinging to Macron’s promise of a brighter future. The plant, which spans eight football fields and opened last summer, has received some 840 million euros ($910 million) in state subsidies. It sits on a site once dominated by Française de Mécanique, a Stellantis subsidiary that makes internal combustion engines, which has cut its workforce to about 1,400 from 6,000 at its peak. As its dismantling process continues, ACC has pledged to hire back 700 of its former employees.
Among them is Christophe Lequimme, 52, who built car engines for 22 years before being trained by ACC to work on lithium car batteries.
Billy-Berclau’s shaky fortunes run through his family, starting with his grandfather, who lost his job in the mines when they closed in the 1960s but found work at Française de Mécanique. Lequimme’s father and mother worked at the same factory, and Lequimme followed in their footsteps. When the layoffs came, he jumped at the chance to work at ACC.
“It’s a great opportunity for a new beginning,” he said.
But that optimism has not found an echo in the community at large.
In last weekend’s parliamentary election, Bruno Bilde, a local National Rally politician close to Le Pen, won nearly 60 percent of the vote, eliminating his main rival, Steve Bossart, the center-left mayor of Billy-Berclau.
Bilde declined interview requests, but in the run-up to the election it actively courted voters at the ACC factory, posting a photo of itself with a group of supporters brandishing NRA leaflets on X. “Thank you for your welcome,” it wrote, adding: “NRA is the leading party for the workers!”
Such talk makes ACC officials nervous. Matthieu Hubert, the company’s general secretary, said National Rally has branded electric vehicles as cars for the elite and that its platform calls for an end to the European Union’s ban on gas-powered vehicles from 2035, designed to combat climate change.
“I can’t say I’m not worried,” Hubert said, adding that European carmakers are racing to stay ahead of Asian and American rivals by producing cleaner vehicles, restoring supply chains and manufacturing batteries. “This factory represents the future.”
For Billy-Berclau mayor Mr 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 and have decent pensions. People have jobs and unemployment is low,” said Brossart, 28, who was born in Billy-Berclau. “And we are attracting big investments, like the ACC factory.”
Still, the feeling of insecurity among the city’s inhabitants was growing, even though there was no crime like in larger cities. But on television, news programmes frequently show images of migrants in Calais, near the English Channel, and link them to reports of crime, adding to concerns.
Brossart said there was also a feeling that Macron had lost touch with society and did not understand its problems. 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 soaring energy bills that the National Rally has promised to reduce.
“This region is more attractive than ever for investors,” says Bossart. “But people’s anger has built up. As soon as they can vote, they show their desperation.”
Ségolène Le Stradic Billy-Berclau contributed reporting.
