AFP, Florange :
Towering above the Moselle valley in northeast France are two rusting testaments to the dashed hopes of Francois Hollande’s presidency that loom large over the election of his successor next year.
Five years after steel giant ArcelorMittal snuffed out the last two blast furnaces in a crucible of France’s heavy industry, the workers who fought to save their beloved “cathedrals”, as they call them, are still seething.
Lakshmi Mittal, the Indian billionaire owner of the sprawling steelworks that runs between the towns of Florange and Hayange, is the target of much of their ire.
But the ruling Socialists are also feeling the heat.
They are accused of betraying voters who elected Hollande on a promise to tame capitalism and keep the Florange fires burning.
“I will never again vote Socialist. Never. It’s over,” said Lionel Burriello, a 39-year-old mechanic, who followed his Italian immigrant father into the steel mills.
“It was a shit job, toiling in the heat and the dust. But we took pride in it,” said the trade unionist, one of the 629 workers who were moved to jobs in the site’s rolling mills or pensioned off under a 2012 compromise brokered by the government. For Olivier Weber, another son of the valley who carried out the last smelting operation in October 2011, the loss of the hot steel mills robbed the region of a key marker of its identity. “Seeing the furnaces is like seeing the graves of relatives in the cemetery.
It’s painful,” the 35-year-old said.
The deindustrialisation that fuelled Brexit and Donald Trump’s rise to the White House has created fertile ground for far-right leader Marine Le Pen, who is hoping to pull off a similar upset in the April-May election on a protectionist platform.
Towering above the Moselle valley in northeast France are two rusting testaments to the dashed hopes of Francois Hollande’s presidency that loom large over the election of his successor next year.
Five years after steel giant ArcelorMittal snuffed out the last two blast furnaces in a crucible of France’s heavy industry, the workers who fought to save their beloved “cathedrals”, as they call them, are still seething.
Lakshmi Mittal, the Indian billionaire owner of the sprawling steelworks that runs between the towns of Florange and Hayange, is the target of much of their ire.
But the ruling Socialists are also feeling the heat.
They are accused of betraying voters who elected Hollande on a promise to tame capitalism and keep the Florange fires burning.
“I will never again vote Socialist. Never. It’s over,” said Lionel Burriello, a 39-year-old mechanic, who followed his Italian immigrant father into the steel mills.
“It was a shit job, toiling in the heat and the dust. But we took pride in it,” said the trade unionist, one of the 629 workers who were moved to jobs in the site’s rolling mills or pensioned off under a 2012 compromise brokered by the government. For Olivier Weber, another son of the valley who carried out the last smelting operation in October 2011, the loss of the hot steel mills robbed the region of a key marker of its identity. “Seeing the furnaces is like seeing the graves of relatives in the cemetery.
It’s painful,” the 35-year-old said.
The deindustrialisation that fuelled Brexit and Donald Trump’s rise to the White House has created fertile ground for far-right leader Marine Le Pen, who is hoping to pull off a similar upset in the April-May election on a protectionist platform.
