It has been the craziest week in French politics for decades but for the Republic’s police it’s business as usual. On Tuesday night they were called to the Trocadero in the centre of Paris to search for four individuals who had violently mugged three Americans. Four youths of Moroccan origin, the youngest of whom was 11, were taken into custody.
A day later in Marseille, a known drug dealer was gunned down in what police believe was a tit-for-tat killing between rival cartels. A few hours later, in the same city, a man was shot dead by police after he had thrown a Molotov cocktail at officers.
The left’s philosophy has for the last half century held sway among France’s cultural and media elite
It has been a busy year for the police in France, what with the spiralling lawlessness and the preparation for next month’s Olympics. But they could soon have more time on their hands if the left-wing coalition wins the upcoming parliamentary elections.
The coalition includes Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s La France Insoumise (LFI) and Philippe Poutou’s New Anti-Capitalist party. Both parties have long-running manifesto pledges to radically reform the police if ever elected, which includes disarming them and removing them from ‘sensitive’ estates where their presence is deemed provocative.
The 72-year-old Mélenchon, who along with the leader of the Communists, has put himself forward as a potential prime minister in the event of a left-wing victory on 7 July, seems to have a particular animus against the police. During campaigning for the 2022 Presidential election, Mélenchon said: ‘There are a lot of people who hate the police, it’s time to realise that’. When a journalist asked if he was one of them, he declined to answer.
Gérald Darmanin, the Interior minister, condemned Mélenchon’s ‘hateful and systematic attacks on police officers’ and said they are ‘ad hominem attacks on the legitimate authority of the Republic’.
Darmanin was asked a question of his own this week. If it came to voting for either a National Rally candidate or one of Mélenchon’s LFI in the election, who would it be? Neither, he replied.
A similar response came from Gerard Larcher, the doyen of the centre-right Republican party and the president of the Senate. Earlier in the week another Republican Grandee, Xavier Bertrand, vowed: ‘Never the National Rally, never Marine Le Pen’.
Both these men are Baby Boomers, or, as the French call them the ’68’ Generation, a reference to the events of May 1968, when France underwent a cultural and social revolution. Another Republican from that generation is Bruno Retailleau, who leads the party in the Senate. He has railed this week against the ‘demagogy’ of Marine Le Pen, and like Bertrand and Larcher refuses the idea of any form of right-wing coalition with Le Pen’s National Rally.
In contrast, the former Socialist President François Hollande is enthusiastic about the left-wing alliance. He, and many others from the centre-left, are prepared to overlook the anti-Semitism and pro-Hamas positions of many within LFI and the New Anti-Capitalist party. Similarly, Hollande has no problem partnering with the Communist party, an ideology responsible for the deaths of 100 million, and counting.
Last November, Serge Klarsfeld, France’s most renowned Holocaust memorial campaigner, praised Marine Le Pen for ridding her party of her father’s anti-Semitism but expressed his despair that the world’s oldest hatred was now being pushed by LFI, though he added ‘that the far left has always had an anti-Semitic tradition’.
People like Hollande can ignore this fact because they believe, like all of the left who emerged from 1968, that virtue is on their side. As the distinguished philosopher Pierre-André Taguieff explained in an essay last year, while the right believes the left is wrong and misguided, it is prepared to debate.
Not the left. They regard the right ‘as the incarnation of evil’ and are ‘characterised by ideological intransigence and an endless blindness to socio-political reality’.
This philosophy has for the last half century held sway among France’s cultural and media elite. The Republican party knows that the far left is more of a danger to France than Marine Le Pen but they don’t want to be seen as ‘evil’ among polite society, so they go along with Macron’s view of Marine Le Pen as the ‘devil’. Macron may not be a Boomer in age, but in ideology he is a classic 68er.
The Republicans’ cowardice in refusing an alliance with the National Rally could let in the left. A poll on Thursday revealed that the left-wing coalition is gathering momentum among its voters; 28 per cent intend to back it, three per cent behind Le Pen’s score. Macron’s ruling Renaissance is a distant third on 18 per cent.
France is lawless enough as it is. But if the left comes to power then the thin blue line will be removed and citizens risk being left at the mercy of drug lords, Islamists and gangsters.
