Inside Le Pen’s heartland where residents are itching for chance to oust Macron | Dispatch

When Marine Le Pen’s populist National Rally (RN) cruised to victory in Sunday’s European elections, nowhere did the party do as well as Bruay-la-Buissière, in northern France. Cheers erupted in its town hall when RN, led by 28-year-old Jordan Bardella, took 31.5 per cent of the national vote, more than double that of Emmanuel Macron’s Renaissance party. In Bruay, itself, the figures were massive as Mr Bardella sauntered home with per cent of the vote, the highest score for a French town with more than 10,000 inhabitants. The Macron camp, by comparison, mustered just per cent. Now the town’s residents, like the rest of France, are being asked to go out and vote twice more in snap legislative elections on June 30 and July 7 after the French president surprised the nation by dissolving parliament. With its terraced red-brick houses and mining museum, Bruay is situated in Ms Le Pen’s French fiefdom in the Pas-de-Calais where she sits as an MP. For the pas