Islanders still in the middle of French election

ST. PIERRE, St. Pierre and Miquelon — Christine Hamel remembers when the island of St. Pierre, a foggy French outpost a dozen miles off the coast of Newfoundland, once thronged with fishermen from Europe, Russia and Canada. The bars were full, ships in the harbor shimmered with a scaly bounty, and life was a contented pastiche of French habits, from fresh morning croissants to nightly digestifs.

The fishing industry is long gone from the French territory, home to 6,000 French citizens. Overfishing and geographic disputes with Canada have left the tiny islands clinging to France’s vast bureaucratic system to survive.

So when the French presidential candidate Marine Le Pen alighted on St. Pierre last year and promised to revive its fishing industry and strengthen economic ties to France, Hamel, 57, a retired police officer, decided to vote for the far-right hopeful.

“France has ignored St. Pierre for too long,” she said late last month, echoing the accusation Le Pen leveled during her visit to the island in March 2016, a rare stop for a French politician.

“Why not try Le Pen? Macron won’t do anything for us. He’s just twisting and turning like a flag in the wind,” she added, referring to Emmanuel Macron, the centrist candidate. Macron and Le Pen will face each other in a runoff election Sunday.

For the people of St. Pierre and its sister island of Miquelon, mostly descendants of fishermen from Normandy and Brittany who came in the 19th century for the abundant cod, the electoral battle in France is a pressing reminder of their relationship with the distant republic.

More than 4,000 miles from France and its struggles with terrorism and cultural identity, the islands are a self-governing “overseas collectivity” bound by the French Constitution. The people vote in French elections, are represented in the French Parliament, use euros and rely on millions of euros in subsidies from France and the European Union, even as most goods are imported from Canada. About 40 percent of residents are on the public payroll. Most young people leave for universities and careers in France or Canada, and many don’t return.

“We’re French but far away, and we have our own ideas,” Jean- Pierre Jezequel, 63, a retired technician, said at Le Baratin, a bar not far from General de Gaulle square.

Over the din of a televised soccer game, Jezequel said that the European Union, which a few years ago gave the archipelago about $29 million for new ferryboats to Newfoundland and other infrastructure, has a big impact on their daily lives.

Jezequel voted for Jean-Luc Melenchon, the far-left candidate who won the first electoral round in the islands, but said he planned to vote for Macron — who favors keeping France in the European Union — in the second. “Le Pen wants out of Europe and that can be dangerous for us.” Le Pen finished second and Macron third.

He said he has little hope the next government will be able to steady St. Pierre’s listing fortunes.