Brittany used to be a hotbed for France’s far right. No longer.

Over the decades, so many locals have left Gourin in rural Brittany for the United States that Air France gifted the town a miniature Statue of Liberty.

Residents of that binational identity are so proud that they raised funds four years ago to recast the bronze statue. It is located in a prominent location, in Gourin’s main square, surrounded by columns bearing international flags.

Yet in the recent European Parliament elections, nearly a third of local voters opted for the far-right National Party, a French party built on strong anti-immigration sentiment.

“This is a region that understands what it means to be an immigrant,” said Pierre-Marie Quesseveur, a member of the local Brittany TransAmerica association, who expressed surprise at the election results. “We are very open to all cultures.”

Also stunned by the results, and worried about what might happen in the French legislative elections starting this Sunday, is the centrist mayor of Gourin, Hervé Le Floc’h. President Emmanuel Macron declare early elections on June 9, after the far right defeated his party in the European elections.

“We all have some family in the United States,” Mr. Floc’h said from his office at city hall, which overlooks a miniature Statue of Liberty. While many migrants stayed in the United States, others returned to Gourin with savings to restart life here.

“In high school, half of my friends were born in New York,” said Mr. Le Floc’h, 61, also a dairy farmer.

The northwestern region of Brittany has been a center of Mr Macron’s support and for years a seemingly impenetrable bulwark against France’s far-right movement. The national protest movement holds just eight of the 83 seats on the regional council, and the region has yet to win a single mayoral election or a seat in parliament.

Locals proudly call this place “the exception of Brittany”.

Regional council president Loïg Chesnais-Girard explained that the culture of cooperation between local parties was not compatible with the party’s policy of division. He called the region “extremely temperate.”

Thomas Frinault, a senior lecturer in political science at the University of Rennes 2 who has studied the history of the Rally Nationale in Brittany, said the party’s newfound popularity in the region was a sign that it “has normalised and is emerging as a dominant force”.

In some ways, Brittany seems a hard sell to the far-right’s message that France is plagued by high crime rates and too many immigrants are taking advantage of scarce resources and jobs.

Mr. Le Floc’h cannot think of the last time there was a serious crime in Gourin, a town of 3,800 people surrounded by cow pastures, a 50-minute drive from the coastal city of Lorient. Unemployment is so low, he said, that nearby food processing plants sometimes have trouble finding workers.

“We don’t have an immigration problem here,” he said. “We have very few foreigners here.”

But in speaking to locals at bars, restaurants and a cultural center that hosts regular social gatherings of Gourin’s retirees, it is clear that far-right political views and their gloomy view of the state of the country took root. There is also a bitter sense of abandonment by the ruling class in faraway Paris and burning anger at Mr. Macron.

“He’s only for rich people,” said Yolande Lester, 53, during a break at the creperie where she works.

“Why not try the RN?” she asked, referring to the National Rally by its French acronym. “They’ve never run a country before.”

“They couldn’t get any worse,” she added.

It’s not that no one here votes for the party. Mr. Frinault noted that its numbers have been steadily increasing. But few people admitted to voting for them, according to Joël Sévénéant, owner of a local radio station. “Now, people are talking without restraint,” he said.

What he heard most was a sense that rural life had not improved in 40 years. Gas and heating costs had risen. Local hospitals continued to lose full-time emergency services, so when National Rally chairman Jordan Bardella talked about undocumented immigrants getting free medical care, it struck a nerve.

“The RN is riding on this discontent,” Mr. Sévénéant said. “There is a general boredom towards Paris.”

Opposite the town’s 16th-century Roman Catholic cathedral, inside a small bar where locals can buy newspapers and cigarettes, two men are drinking beer after a long day of manual labor. listed the reasons they planned to vote for Mr. Bardella’s party.

Speaking of failed asylum seekers who remain in the country illegally, Thierry Beigneux, 55, said: “They commit a crime.” “Not here,” he explained. “We don’t have much crime here. But in France.”

“We don’t have immigrants here,” agreed Hervé Pensivy, 62, a construction contractor. “But they will come.”

Mr. Frinault, the university lecturer, explained the feelings like this: “There is a fear that is being stoked through television, radio, newspapers and social media. You have a segment of the population that, without being confronted with these issues, develops a kind of fear of them.”

The National Rally Party’s local parliamentary candidate, Nathalie Guihot-Vieira, admitted that these worries do not stem from the realities of the region, but from a persistent fear that problems will appears here.

“People are afraid there will be chaos,” she said during a brief respite from a tense two-week election campaign.

Because the party does not yet have a solid foothold in this region of Brittany, known as Morbihan, Ms. Guihot-Vieira, a retired naval officer, had to learn how to register as a candidate and how to campaign. She only recently learned that Ms take over her party’s campaign efforts across Morbihan, after the person doing the job was fired.

One of the party’s core principles is “nationality first” — reserving social benefits, subsidized housing, certain jobs and access to free medical care for the public. French residents, not for non-French residents.

“We pay taxes, and we live in a medical desert and can’t find doctors, but they give free medical treatment to foreigners,” said Guihot-Vieira.

She added: “When you talk like this, people call you a racist. “But that’s not racism, that’s a fair request.”

In its early years, the National Rally Party was openly racist. Its founder and long-time leader, Jean Marie Le Pen, stated that people of different races “do not have the same abilities, nor the same level of historical evolution” and has repeatedly was convicted for making anti-Semitic comments and publicly downplaying the Holocaust.

Since his daughter Marine took over as party leader in 2011, she has worked to eradicate anti-Semitism from the party, even expelling her father.

However, many people do not believe that the party has fundamentally changed.

Alex Flusen is one of them. He moved to Gourin for work just two months ago, but he’s planning on making the long trip this weekend—a six-hour drive—to Paris, where he’s still registered to vote.

“I am the grandson of immigrants. I could never vote for the RN,” he said. “My grandparents survived Auschwitz.” The party, he added, “goes against all French values.”

Pollsters predicted a high turnout, and Mr. Floc’h, the mayor, wondered what that would mean for Brittany and his small town.

“Are the European elections just a protest vote?” he asked. Maybe people would vote differently when it was a national election, he said.

“But it is possible,” he added, “that people will continue to protest.”