Front National candidate ended her presidential campaign in an area of what she calls ‘forgotten France’, where many locals lap up her warnings on globalisation

Marine Le Pen ended eight months of presidential campaigning as she began it: in a field in deepest rural France. In the Somme, scene of some of the first world war’s bloodiest battles, where 150,000 Commonwealth servicemen lie buried among now verdant, undulating hills and cultivated fields, Le Pen has won the battle for hearts, minds and votes.

This is Le Pen’s “forgotten France”, far from the Parisian elite she professes to despise, where there is little chance of being targeted by protesters throwing fresh eggs from a local farmer, as she was a few hours earlier in Brittany.

Le Pen launched her campaign last September in an even smaller commune, Brachay, population 55, in north-eastern France, where the Front National (FN) has won every election since 2007. She finished it eight months later in Ennemain, in the post-industrial northern belt, where she scored 38% in the first-round vote a fortnight ago.

“Like Brachay, this is part of France that has been forgotten but is close to Marine Le Pen’s heart. She has never forgotten those in rural France who depend on politicians to look after them,” her adviser, Florian Philippot, said as he strode across the field.

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For the 230 Ennemainois, the feeling is mutual. “Marine, on t’aime” (Marine, we love you), they chanted, using the familiar tu form that is normally reserved for friends and family.

Ennemain’s annual village fete is normally a sedate affair. Not this year. The stalls selling fries, beer and local vegetables were swamped by Le Pen supporters. They waved flags, roaring their support with chants of “Marine president”, “We will win” and “On est chez nous” (this is our home”), and sang the Marseillaise. Even the threat of rain could not dampen their ardour.

Young children and their mothers sported fake blue roses – Le Pen’s campaign symbol – in hairbands or pinned to blouses. Tattooed foundry-workers had tucked the flower into shirt pockets or the buttonholes of their jackets. FN representatives who had come from Paris stood out with their tailored suits, and wore more discreet blue rose lapel badges alongside the FN flame pin. The daily Libération reported that a well-known member of the local neo-Nazi group known as the “White Wolf Clan” had been spotted among the knots of closely shaven men.

Laetitia Roland, 38, a street seller, said the local people adored Le Pen because she “understands our misery. She has come to the heart of real France, she knows our anger when shops and businesses close down, when people can’t find jobs. She is the only one who can save France.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Children walk past election campaign posters for Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen, in Osses, southwestern France. Photograph: Bob Edme/AP

This is also a fearful France. Le Pen’s 40-minute speech was aimed at a wider audience but was peppered with the populist words she knows will strike a chord with those in rural communities like Ennemain, who feel left behind by a fast-moving world and see what Le Pen calls “wild globalisation” as a threat. The divide was highlighted early in the second-round campaign by simultaneous visits by Le Pen and rival Emmanuel Macron to a Whirlpool appliance factory at Amiens in the Somme. Its American owners are shutting it down, leaving more than 200 people out of work, to move to Poland.

Le Pen’s verbal triggers – sovereignty, border security, delinquents, Islamists, immigration – are the markers of what has been the FN’s great strategic success in this election: the division of France into two clear camps, the winners from globalisation and the losers, the forgotten “peasants” and Paris’s “arrogant elite”, town and country, pro-Europe v anti-Europe, haves and have-nots, those represented by Macron – cue boos from the crowd – who are “diluting” the nationalists’ idea of French identity, and those led by Le Pen – cheers – defending it.

“I don’t like Macron because he only represents the wealthy, and what good is that for us?” said Florent Guilloy, 34, a local boilermaker. “We have tried the left. We have tried the right. Nothing has worked. I say, let’s try the FN and see what happens.” Guilloy said he hoped for change. “Change for France, that’s what we need.”

His colleague, Philippe Dodré, 49, agreed. “Marine will defend the ordinary workers, people like me, real French people. There’s a lot of unemployment in this area. Jobs go elsewhere and are not replaced. What are we to do?”

Joël Gombin, one of France’s leading experts on the far right, said Le Pen’s success in shifting the debate from the traditional left-right divide had resulted in the elimination of the Socialist party and opposition Les Républicains in the first-round vote.

“The FN is exploiting a new dynamic of globalists v patriots and doing so successfully. The second round is a clash of these two ideologies,” he said at a conference at the Jean Jaurès Foundation. But he said this did not guarantee victory. “There is nothing to indicate that the FN can win on the basis of this divide,” he said.

Jean-Yves Camus, director of the foundation’s Observatory of Radical Politics and FN specialist, said he saw something more sinister in the divide and the “rhetorical violence” of the Le Pen campaign. “What worries me very much is that this ‘neither right nor left’ has been replaced with a detestation, verging on hatred, of everything that is not oneself. The idea that there is no common destiny … that the ‘other’ is your enemy … This idea of a concerted attempt to dilute French identity, this replacement theory, is a very old theme, and is likely to keep coming back,” he said.

Camus said that, even if Le Pen was defeated, the deeper question would remain: “What do the more hardline FN voters really want?”

Macron criticises Le Pen for being part of the Parisian elite she reviles, not least because – as the youngest daughter of FN founder Jean-Marie – she grew up in a manor house in the affluent Paris suburb of Saint-Cloud, trained as a lawyer and lives in Paris.

But to the villagers of Ennemain, Le Pen is one of them. “We’re going to win,” they chanted. “We have won,” shouted one.