While Emmanuel Macron spent Sunday in London honouring the memory of the late Queen Elizabeth, Marine Le Pen marked her return from a summer break with an address to the party faithful in the south of France.

Buoyed by the success of the Swedish right in last week’s election, and anticipating a similar result on Sunday when the Italians go to the polls, Le Pen attributed what she called a ‘patriotic wave’ sweeping the continent to the EU’s failure to tackle mass immigration in the last decade.

In the opinion of Le Pen no one embodies this failure more than Macron. Last Thursday the president told an assembly of prefects that a new immigration bill would be tabled by his government in early 2023. He believes it will be a much-needed reformation of the current system, which he described as ‘dilatory’ and one result will be the swifter deportation of undesirable migrants. For those who are entitled to remain in France, Macron said he wanted them removed from the squalid camps in Paris and Calais and relocated to ‘rural areas, which are losing their population’.

Le Pen expressed indignation at Macron’s idea in her speech on Sunday. ‘He is proposing nothing less than to impose on your villages and towns an immigration that you did not ask for,’ she said, in a message to France’s rural mayors.

Some of the mayors will share her disquiet but others are more in tune with president Macron. One such is Jean-Yves Rolland, the mayor of Callac in Brittany, where 70 families from Africa are scheduled to soon arrive. He believes their presence will help regenerate the village and the local area, but some of the 2,000 villagers disagree.

On Saturday around 300 of them staged a demonstration against the imminent arrival of the migrants, supported by some activists from Renconquest, the far-right party founded by Eric Zemmour. Opposing them in the village square were some pro-migrant villagers and several hundred people from a variety of far-left organisations, including Antifa, who had on social media called for a show of strength against the ‘fascists’.

The villagers claim their opposition is not motivated by racism but more a feeling of injustice; for years there has been no investment in the village or the region, even though the agricultural industry has been declining. Now suddenly money – private and public – is pouring in to renovate houses and community buildings for the new arrivals. They also want to know how the migrants will find work given that unemployment in the region runs at around 18 per cent.

Le Pen is not a lone voice in challenging the idea of repopulating rural communities with migrants. A scathing editorial by the centre-right Le Figaro declared: ‘Tomorrow, it’s the Seine-Saint-Denis for everyone!’, a reference to the department north of Paris, which has come to symbolise the ‘lost territory of the Republic’, where a parallel society hostile to French values has taken root this century.

What the vast majority of French people want, concluded Le Figaro, ‘is not a better distribution of immigrants, but a control of our borders.’ Opinion polls consistently bear out this statement; one, in 2021, found that 62 per cent of people supported the idea of a referendum on the question of future immigration.

Macron addressed the prefects on the same day that Magdalena Andersson resigned as Sweden’s Prime Minister after an election that saw the right-wing Swedish Democrats become the country’s second largest party with over 20 per cent of the vote.

Andersson paid the price for years of liberal indifference to mass immigration that has resulted in the emergence in Sweden of unprecedented levels of violence, disproportionally the work of immigrant gangs.

In response to the Swedish election result the respected French political scientist, Dominique Reynié, predicted that this was just a foretaste of things to come if the continent’s leaders continued to duck the question of mass immigration. ‘Europe is threatened by becoming more right wing in its views as a consequence of EU member states refusing to take into consideration this preoccupation,’ he told the tabloid, Le Parisien.

There are already several troubling similarities between Sweden and France: the sheer numbers of migrants in the last decade and the resultant rise in gang violence, what the French call the ‘ensauvagement’ of their society. Many of those convicted are foreign nationals: they make up 25 per cent of France’s 68,000 prison inmates.

Distributing migrants to the countryside will do little to ease France’s immigration crisis. That will only be resolved when, as Le Figarostated, the country regains control of its borders. If it doesn’t the migrants will continue to come, and that will have implications for the number of migrants attempting to reach England from France

Earlier this month a report in Le Monde revealed that more than 70,000 migrants have entered Europe across the Serbia/Hungary border this year, three times the number who used the route in the whole of 2021. Most hail from Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco.

In addition, those making the passage across the Mediterranean onto Italian territory are arriving in numbers not seen since the great migrant crisis of 2015, and now as then, the majority are young men.

Sweden welcomed 160,000 migrants that year, to the pride of the then prime minister Stefan Löfven. ‘My Europe takes in refugees, my Europe doesn’t build walls,’ he told a rally in Stockholm in September 2015. ‘We need to decide right now what kind of Europe we are going to be.’

Seven years later Sweden has decided what kind of Europe it wants to be, and it’s not Löfven’s kind. It remains to be seen whether France will follow in its footsteps.