The attack on the campaign team of French government spokeswoman and MP candidate Prisca Thevenot while putting up election posters on Wednesday night in Meudon, on the outskirts of Paris, has highlighted the tension in France just days before Sunday’s legislative elections, which could bring the far right to power for the first time.
“Violence and intimidation have no place in our democracy,” the outgoing prime minister, Gabriel Attal, immediately condemned. The attack left Thevenot’s deputy injured in the arm and one of his collaborators fractured in the jaw. From a television studio, the leading candidate of the far right, Jordan Bardella, also expressed “full support” for Thevenot and called for “calm and appeasement” in the hours of campaigning that remain until midnight on Friday.
As Thevenot herself explained to the newspaper The Parisian The attack occurred on Thursday when he and his deputy and campaign team decided to go out and put up some election posters. “It all happened very quickly,” said the government spokesperson. With his team was a “small group of young people, about ten” who were “destroying” the posters. When they were called to attention, they “attacked” one of his collaborators, “injuring Virginie” Lanlo, his deputy, in the process. Both were immediately taken to hospital, while Thevenot filed a complaint at the police station. The Nanterre prosecutor’s office has opened an investigation for “group violence against an elected official” and four people have been arrested, three of them minors, the capital newspaper said.
Attacks on parliamentary candidates, a phenomenon that was seen in other European countries during the last European Parliament elections, have increased in recent days in France.
A few hours before the attack on Thevenot, Marie Dauchy, a candidate for the National Rally (RN) party from Bardella in Savoy, in the east of the country, also denounced on X that she was suspending her campaign after having suffered a “violent attack” in a local market. According to the daily Southwestthe attacker is in preventive detention for “repeated threats of death, insults and contraventional violence”. On Monday, Nicolas Conquer, candidate in Cherbourg for the split from the conservative party The Republicans (LR) that has allied itself with the extreme right, was also attacked when, as he told The Figaro“a dozen young people between 25 and 30 years old” began to throw “stones and various objects taken from the street” at him and his team while shouting insults. One of the projectiles hit a minor, as did Conquer, who said he received several in the back. Four people were arrested and charged with “group violence.”
Despite the growing number of complaints of such acts, the secretary general of the police union Unsa-Police, Thierry Clair, rejected on Thursday that this was a situation of violence out of the ordinary. During election periods “the atmosphere heats up,” he said on the radio station France Info, but it is not a new phenomenon, he stressed. However, he acknowledged the increase not only in physical attacks, but also verbal ones throughout this legislative campaign in which, as various politicians have denounced in recent days and weeks, the strong arrival of the extreme right has opened the door to a racist and xenophobic discourse in part of society. In the press, there have been increasing reports of verbal or physical attacks against French people of immigrant origin and not only among candidates, but also against ordinary citizens. The French president, Emmanuel Macron, condemned last week from Brussels the “uninhibited racism or anti-Semitism” that was being experienced during the campaign.
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