France’s westernmost region gave him 29% of first-round votes, more than any other – but even here cracks are visible

For Jean-Michel Blin, clambering into his car with a hastily bought lunchtime baguette at the close of the weekly market in Plerguer, a quiet Brittany village half an hour inland from Saint-Malo, it was not a difficult decision.

“I’ll vote Macron, and with pleasure,” he said. “He’s not my first choice – I’m of the right, always have been. But he’s young, he’s new, he’s ambitious, he wants to change things … It’s fine. My vote will be a positive one.”

Blin, a 54-year-old insurance agent, cast his ballot for François Fillon, the scandal-hit centre-right candidate, in the first round of France’s presidential race last month. He was “coherent, experienced … a man of presidential stature”, he said.

But faced with a choice between an independent centrist and a far-right leader in Sunday’s runoff, he – like many in France’s westernmost region – has few doubts. On the whole, they like the look of Macron here. Marine Le Pen, not so much.

If the presidential frontrunner – a liberal, socially progressive, internationally minded 39-year-old former banker and economy minister who has never held elected office – was in search of a political heartland, he might consider Brittany.

Who is Emmanuel Macron? The 39-year-old was raised in Picardy, studied philosophy and was briefly a rising star in the the civil service before joining Rothschild as an investment banker. He served François Hollande first as senior adviser then as economy minister, before resigning and launching his campaign. Macron defines himself as an energetic outsider, 'of the left' and progressive on social issues, but economically liberal and pro-business. His youthful movement En Marche! (Let’s Go!) draws thousands to its rallies. Opponents say his crusade to reinvent the political system is presumptuous and have criticised his deliberately flexible approach to policy. Read our profile

More than 29% of voters here plumped for him in the first round, a greater proportion than in any other region of France. Le Pen, leader of the France-first Front National (FN), got 15.3% – less than in any other mainland region except Île-de-France, which includes Paris.

Romain Pasquier, a political scientist at the National Centre for Scientific Research in Rennes, said the centrist should be looking at 65%-plus of Bretons’ votes in the final round. “Macron and Brittany,” he said, “are pretty much a perfect fit.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A supporter puts up posters for Emmanuel Macron in Rennes before the first-round vote. Photograph: Damien Meyer/AFP/Getty Images

That’s because since the turn of the century, the left here has been “predominantly a centre-left”, he said, and the right “predominantly a moderate right. And for social, economic, cultural reasons, the FN has not, traditionally, done well.”

Historically an under-performer, the region’s economy has been catching up in recent years, so unemployment – a key far-right recruiter – has not thus far been a factor. Nor, to any great extent, has immigration, Brittany having long been a land that people left rather than came to.

Social inequality, says Thomas Frinault, a political scientist at Rennes University, is lower in Brittany than the French average. There is an openness to the wider world – an “awareness of elsewhere” – lacking in some parts of France.

But in a country as fundamentally fractured as France – east and north from west; graduates from school-leavers; thriving, cosmopolitan cities from left-behind small towns and villages – even Brittany now looks divided.

Plerguer’s voters cast exactly as many ballots (378: it’s a small place) for Macron as they did for Le Pen. One of those who voted Marine was Jeannine, 85. “It was what they say about immigration,” she said. “We won’t be French any more.”

Half an hour to the north-east, near Mont Saint-Michel, are bucolic villages where the far-right leader attracted more than 30% of the first-round vote.

Insecure, poorly paid jobs and a sense of urban winners but rural losers have taken hold – and with them, the FN. “Not as fast or as deeply as elsewhere, but now it has roots,” said Frinault. “Not in the cities: 6.7% in Rennes. That’s a fracture.”

Le Pen, affirmed Marie-Jeanne Kermeur, who described herself as a mother, is “for the little people. She’s for those who don’t have much to live on, or to live for. The single mothers, the pensioners. Macron doesn’t have a word to say about us.”

Part of a small crowd that gathered to cheer the far-right leader, who was visiting a road haulage company in the town of Dol-de-Bretagne, Kermeur said Le Pen could be sure of her vote. Michel Lemonnier, a retired driver, said likewise.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Marine Le Pen climbs into the cab of a lorry during her visit to the haulage company in Dol-de-Bretagne. Photograph: Damien Meyer/AFP/Getty Images

“We just need change, to be honest,” Lemonnier said. “We need someone who won’t make the same empty promises, who talks about the kind of things that are actually important to us. Not too much to ask, is it?”

He said he would feel “sick” if Le Pen was not elected. Not far away, others were feeling sick already. “I don’t even want to talk about it,” said Marie-Ange, who runs a women’s clothing boutique in the chic coastal resort of Dinard.

Sipping a tea outside the Marché des Anges café, she said the second round was “a catastrophe. An impossible choice. I just want it over.” Dinard, home to a lot of well-off retired people, put Fillon – an arch social conservative – first.

Half an hour south, in the historic walled town of Dinan, were more unhappy voters. Jérémie Caillé, 34, an artist with a small gallery on one of the town’s cobbled streets, voted for Jean-Luc Mélenchon – who finished second overall in Brittany.

“I voted with my heart, for change and social justice,” he said. But in the hard-left veteran’s absence from the runoff, he was finding it “impossible to recognise anything of myself at all” in either of the finalists.

Whether – and for whom – people like Caillé and Marie-Ange decide to vote will prove critical in Sunday’s result. Nationwide polls suggest 40% of Fillon voters will support Macron, 30% Le Pen and 25% abstain or spoil their ballot paper.

Of Mélenchon’s voters, 50% could back Macron and 13% Le Pen, and more than 30% may abstain or spoil their ballot. Even if the centre holds, at its outer edges France’s republican front – which has long shut the FN out of power – might be wobbling.

“I’m not voting,” said Dominique Brunner, a bitter Fillon voter in Plerguer. “For the first time in my life, I honestly can’t. Le Pen … well, a monster. And Macron’s as bad. Both as fake as each other.”

Caillé, too, said he would abstain. “If that means Le Pen wins, so be it,” he said. “Sometimes France needs a big shock to really move forward.” But his artist partner, Julie Mainguet, another Mélenchonista, said she would be voting Macron.

In Plerguer, a fellow Mélenchon voter, Ghislaine Respaud, said the same: “Le Pen has to be stopped,” she said. Likewise Christine Lenoir, a cheerful pensioner: “I’ll hold my nose in the polling booth. Le Pen carries her father’s luggage.”

On the centre right, plenty seemed happy. “Macron, no problem,” said Emmanuel Lacombe, a retired businessman in Dinard. “He’s Fillon-lite.” Even if personally, he was “not really to my taste – marrying a woman 20 years your senior: bit odd.”

On the centre left, too, the front was holding – even in the first round. “I would normally vote Socialist, but they had no hope,” said Gérard Dantec, a care worker, in Dinan. “Macron had to be in the runoff. My vote was tactical, but not grudging.”

Serge, who runs the Passiflore florist in the same town, said he had not truly voted “wholeheartedly, for my convictions” since Mitterrand back in 1981, but “Macron’s the least worst, by a long way. And he looks clean.”

In Brittany, then, on this (and the pollsters’) evidence, Macron seems a shoo-in. Elsewhere, in the blasted post-industrial north and east and the FN strongholds in the south, it will doubtless prove a different story.

But the republican front can work in strange ways. Bright-eyed Jeannine in Plerguer, who voted happily for Le Pen in the first round, said she would spoil her ballot in the second. “She’s a bit frightening, when you look at her,” she said.

And outside the haulage factory in Dol, Julien Chaput, 24, a trainee policeman who also voted for the FN leader in the first round, said he, too, would not be doing the same on Sunday. “She blew it in the TV debate,” he said.

“She was bad on Europe, she never once talked about education, she spent the whole time sneering and smirking and attacking. That’s fine in opposition. For me and quite a few others, I suspect, it’s really not fine for a president.”

