As the glitterball twinkled and the raffle table heaved with prizes in a Lancashire pub in the former mill village of Bamber Bridge, Margaret West was feeling happier than she had for months. The Blackpool rock‘n’roll dancer and former education worker had been so angry and stressed over Brexit she’d lost sleep over it, felt ignored by politicians and unfairly insulted online for voting to leave. But then something came along that made her feel represented, “that gave me a sense of excitement, something new and worthy like the Suffragette movement”, she said. It was Nigel Farage’s Brexit party.

West had never been involved in politics and had voted Labour before switching to Conservative. Now she is one of more than 100,000 Brexit party supporters who donated online, put stickers in their windows and went to Farage’s roadshow rallies. At this Brexit party pub night south of Preston, supporters were looking ahead to planning a Westminster election campaign. “It’s like being swept up on a tide,” West said. “There’s such a great atmosphere. I’ve never been to the football but when Nigel walks out at a rally, I imagine that’s the feeling you get when your team scores a goal.”

In the north-west, where cities such as Manchester and Liverpool voted remain in the EU referendum but a swathe of former mill towns in Lancashire voted leave, the European election campaign showed how Britain has a level of disillusionment with the political system greater than disaffection in almost all other EU countries.

Viewed from abroad, there has been growing interest at the Brexit party’s well-run European election campaign, because until recently Britain had been seen as an exception to the rise in parties styled on a model of the people v the corrupt elite. From countries such as France and Italy, where populism has steadily grown for years, Britain was seen as standing apart – “a place of pragmatism”, as one French centrist put it – where people respected political institutions and the traditional party system. The Brexit crisis has appeared to blow that trust apart.

A few miles away in Preston, far-right activist Tommy Robinson, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, was addressing hundreds at his biggest street rally of the campaign. In far-right European politics, there has always been an interest in the potential in the UK for more radical, nationalist politics. Jean-Marie Le Pen, the former leader of the French far-right, flew to Cheshire 15 years ago to support the British National party leader, Nick Griffin’s, European parliament campaign. Eggs and bins were hurled at Le Pen’s car and he complained: “I don’t see why I shouldn’t be able to walk about freely in England.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest MEP candidate Claire Fox talking to supporters. Photograph: Christopher Thomond/The Guardian

But at the Brexit party’s pub meeting, it was the professionalism of local party organisation and the slick online campaign that stood out. One party activist near Blackpool who had previously worked for Ukip, said the Brexit party had learned from Italy’s Five Star Movement. “Why try to reinvent the wheel?” the activist said. With its model of online activism, the Italian movement had quickly leapt from populist protest group to government coalition partner. Farage, the former Ukip leader, has notably set up his new party like a business, ensuring tight control without the internal wrangling that has made traditional parties seem ungovernable during the Brexit crisis.

Campaigners said the party deliberately pushed an optimistic message during the European election campaign. It talked about protecting democracy and the Brexit referendum result. There was little talk of immigration and more focus on disgust at Westminster than the EU, deliberately appealing across old left-right divides.

Claire Fox, the longtime Revolutionary Communist party activist who led the Brexit party campaign in the north-west, sipped her pint and addressed her pub audience: “Politics has come alive!” she said, likening the party to Manchester’s pro-democracy Peterloo massacre. “Let’s get organised and launch a new kind of down-to-earth politics!”

As for the “racism stuff”, opponents were levelling at the party, Fox said: “One third of ethnic minorities voted leave. The idea of calling us bigots – how dare they?”

Many in the room said they felt under attack in a polarised political landscape. One man with a bandage on his finger said he had been “bitten by a remainer dog” while leafleting. The milkshake-throwing of this British campaign had taken on more importance than food-throwing does elsewhere in the EU. The centrist Emmanuel Macron has been egged, other French politicians hit with flour, cream-pies and ketchup and Italian figures are regularly hit by eggs and tomatoes.

Nadine Mason, a student nurse who wants to run for Westminster for the Brexit party, said there was bullying. “Every single person in this room has had someone calling them racist, Nazi, bigoted, or that they hadn’t known what they voted for when they chose to leave the EU,” she said. “Women died for us to have the right to vote – us working-class people – but now we’re being told that we’re not bright enough to vote.”

Kerry Bamber, a jeweller and former council worker, described herself as “your average keyboard warrior” who stood for Ukip in local elections, then moved to the Brexit party. She said: “I grew up on a dairy farm in Lancashire. When European milk quotas came in, I remember sitting on a five-bar gate, swinging my legs, and seeing my granddad’s tears. I did a lot of research before voting leave … There is going to be a smack in the face for the political elite. They are misjudging the mood of the country and I can’t understand why they are so detached from the average person on the street.”

French geographer Christophe Guilluy has likened Brexit supporters to France’s yellow vest anti-government movement – a disaffection with the political class that is likely to last. He said political powers in the UK would not be able to address Britain’s political crisis if they haughtily dismissed leave voters as “xenophobic old people from Yorkshire”.

Karine Tournier-Sol, a politics lecturer at France’s Toulon University, who wrote the only French book on Ukip, said Farage’s “anti-European and anti-establishment discourse” led to him being likened to Marine Le Pen, the French far-right leader and daughter of Jean-Marie. Both “castigated traditional parties” for not representing the people, while claiming to represent the people themselves. However, she said there were key differences such as the economy and the fact that Le Pen no longer says France must leave the EU.

She considered Farage’s rise as a unique brand of “English anti-European nationalism” and said “there is no real equivalent of Nigel Farage in France.”

Meanwhile, in central Manchester, some remain voters felt the EU elections had shown how Brexit broke party loyalties, leaving a sense of political rootlessness.

At the finish line of Manchester’s half-marathon, the north-west candidates for the new pro-EU party, Change UK, stressed that they were political newcomers: Arun Banerji, a junior intensive care doctor at Preston hospital, who signed up for the campaign after a night-shift in A&E with European nurses, and Andrea Cooper, a Liverpool charity executive working with young people in one of Britain’s most deprived areas.

Voters stopped for heated discussions, which were less about the branding failures or logo disasters of a party set up when eight Labour and three Conservative MPs left their parties during the Brexit crisis, and more about whether a new centrist party might be built. “I don’t need much persuading, I’m politically homeless,” said Ian Carnegie, 65, a pro-remain Labour voter from Yorkshire.

David Shimwell, a businessman and former Conservative, campaigning for Change UK with his two poodles, said: “Disaffection with politicians started with the MPs’ expenses scandal. Politicians have had a bunker mentality ever since. That allows Farage to say the system is broken and how corrupt they are. Politicians have to get out of the bunker and sell politics back to the people.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Change UK candidate Andrea Cooper and party supporters hand out election leaflets near the finish line of the Great Manchester Run. Photograph: Christopher Thomond/The Guardian

Some have wondered whether Macron’s centrist party in France could offer lessons. Change UK candidates have echoed Macron’s initial message of offering “hope” and “listening”. But Macron’s party was built around a charismatic leader, in the same way the Brexit party revolves around Farage. The key – Macron insiders say – was to disrupt politics, make everything seem different: name, logo, rhetoric and message.

Natasha Correia, 23, who worked for the NHS, said: “Being a British-born person of colour after the Brexit vote, you could feel a kind of tension, people asking you where you were from. It was quite upsetting.” Describing herself as conflicted over party politics, she said she liked Change UK because it was something new.

Andrew Graystone, who worked in community relations in Manchester before standing for Change UK, said: “There’s a fault line running down the middle of Britain and Brexit exposed it. It’s about who owns the right to see themselves as British: people asking themselves: is this a country for all sorts, or just for people like me?”

Graystone said many emotions were at play. “Both Nigel Farage and Tommy Robinson had fathers who left them when they were young. Both of them are in some ways desperately looking for attention. I’d love to sit with them to talk about that.”

He said there was a space for building what he called new, inclusive politics. “It’s a slow business building bridges. Tearing them down is very quick.”

• This article was amended on 24 May 2019. An earlier version misnamed the Revolutionary Communist party as the Communist Revolutionary party.