France will increase its surveillance of all critical infrastructure after saboteurs wrecked two electricity sub-stations in Nice and Cannes last weekend.
The arsonists deprived nearly 200,000 homes on the Cote d’Azur of electricity, disrupted traffic lights, interrupted the Cannes film festival, shut down cash distributors and brought Nice airport to a temporary standstill.
Addressing parliament on Tuesday, Prime Minister Francois Bayrou declared that the attacks are ‘an extremely serious threat to public order, designed to impress and terrify those who organise such events.’
An extreme-left group claimed responsibility for the attacks in a statement published on the internet. The sabotage was ‘aimed not only at disrupting the [Cannes] festival, but also… Tech start-ups who imagine themselves sheltered, the airport and all the other industrial, military and technological establishments in the area of power.’
As to their motivation, this was attributed to the ‘situation in Gaza, the war in Ukraine, the Sahel, but also the migration issue, ecology.’
Although the claim has yet to be verified, a source close to the investigation told the media that whoever carried out the attacks were ‘well-informed’.
The same was said of the group that last July brought the French rail network to a standstill on the opening day of the Paris Olympics. The saboteurs, who struck in three places, are still being hunted but are believed to be far-left extremists.
This type of sophisticated guerrilla attacks were predicted in a 2023 book written by Anthony Cortes, a journalist who spent time undercover in a far-left training camp. The book, The Coming Confrontation: From Eco Resistance to Eco-Terrorism, depicts a well-trained and highly motivated conglomeration of anti-fascists, Trotskyists, anti-capitalists, anarchists and eco-warriors. What unites them is a fanatical desire to bring down the ‘system’.
This determination isn’t limited to France. In recent years far-left groups in Germany and Italy are believed to be responsible for attacks on their countries’ rail networks, and Tesla factories in Germany have also been targeted by the far-left in the last 18 months. In the latest incident, in February this year, environmental saboteurs destroyed an electricity pylon close to the factory southeast of Berlin. Not only was power to the factory disrupted, but hundreds of homes in surrounding villages also had their supply cut.
This doesn’t bother the extremists who, whether French, German or Italian, believe that they have virtue on their side. This may also explain why this guerrilla warfare receives relatively little media coverage. Were it far-right extremists bringing down power lines and sabotaging railway lines, one suspects it would be front page news.
Earlier this month a group of MEPs from Marine Le Pen’s National Rally tabled a question in the European Parliament in which they warned of ‘Far-left attacks threatening European infrastructure’. They listed several examples of their sabotage, including an attack last December of a telecommunications antenna near Mâcon that left 800,000 people without internet access, and expressed surprise that none of the perpetrators have been apprehended. The MEPs wanted to know why ‘the Antifa movement is operating with complete impunity’.
A Belgian MEP, Tom Vandendriessche, posed a similar question about Antifa to the EU in January 2022 after it was revealed they had ‘drawn up a “death list’ containing 53 politicians from the right-wing AfD party, together with instructions on how to make bombs.’ Wasn’t it time Antifa were designated a terrorist organisation? said Vandendriessche.
Last year several members of a splinter group of Antifa, the Jeune Garde, were accused of beating up a Jewish youth on the Paris metro, and in February Antifa activists used violence in an attempt to influence the student elections at Strasbourg university.
A fortnight ago France’s Interior Minister, Bruno Retailleau, proscribed the Jeune Garde because he believed that they incite ‘armed demonstrations or violent acts against persons or property.’ Previous Interior Ministers have banned far-right groups but baulked at imposing similar punishments on their far-left equivalents.
The Jeune Garde is just one of many far-left extremist groups in France which, in the words of security expert Thibault de Montbrial, seek to sow chaos in the country. ‘Cut the electricity and you completely cut the capacity of a country to function,’ he explained in an interview on Monday, citing as examples last month’s 12-hour blackout in the Iberian Peninsula.
De Montbrial believes that the attacks at Cannes and Nice are just the hors d’oeuvre. ‘One day we will have something much bigger and much more coordinated and it will be a prelude to things far more serious,’ he said. De Montbrial recently hosted a security conference at which Retailleau was the keynote speaker.
Far-left extremism is one of the many challenges facing France. Last week the focus was on the Muslim Brotherhood, and their growing influence. Their modus operandi is soft power. By comparison, the extreme-left want to destabilise the Republic using violence and chaos.