In France, candidates who have absolutely no connection to the places are picked by the party, to run - not only in parliamentary elections, but in mayoral ones sometimes ! Backroom deals between and inside parties decide candidacies, without any kind of public consultations. Sometimes, when parties really go to far, there might be "dissident" candidacies.
It isn't extremely common in France, but yes, I think it's rare in other countries to have local election candidates/mayoral candidates handpicked by the party and placed in random places. Most often the parties do it to placate allies (George Sarre, an MRC bigwig, was dropped into some rural Creuse constituency instead of Paris in 2007) or for gender/ethnic minority stuff. In the more extreme cases, it backfires badly.
