Two days after a demonstration against the mega-basins which turned into a pitched battle between the police and activists, the maintenance of order is today at the heart of the invectives between the left and the government.
MP LFI Clémence Guetté, announced this morning on RTL the desire of his group to request a “parliamentary commission of inquiry into the choices made in terms of maintaining order in Sainte-Soline”. Extremely violent clashes opposed anti-basin activists this Saturday to 3,200 gendarmes and police in this town of the Deux Sèvres.
Entrenched at the foot of this “megabasin”, the security forces quickly responded by raising several successive walls of tear gas, launched some 4,000 disencirclement grenades and used water cannons while four of their vehicles were set on fire. Estimated at more than a thousand by the Deux-Sèvres prefecture, the most virulent elements were, some of them equipped with homemade shields, sticks or snowshoes, several hundred of them thus targeted the reserve.
The MP for Val-de-Marne deplored “wounded on the demonstrators side because they were just there to demonstrate” and “wounded on the police side because they just obeyed an absurd order (…) which is to protect a huge hole. The elected official also regretted the way in which the maintenance of order was organised: “during kilometers of demonstrations we did not meet anyone and then we arrived in front of a mega-basin with 3,000 police officers who were defending (it) and had order to do so whatever the cost”.
Véran castigates the “irresponsible” presence of elected officials
According to a report from the prosecution on Sunday evening, two seriously injured gendarmes “are now in relative emergency”. A total of 47 soldiers and seven demonstrators were taken care of by the emergency services. One of the injured protesters is still between life and death.
The organizers – the agricultural union Confédération paysanne, the collective of associations Bassines non merci and the environmental movement of the Uprisings of the Earth – report a much heavier toll: 200 demonstrators injured, including 40 seriously. That of the prosecution only relates to the wounded officially rescued, which may explain the discrepancy between the figures.
Jean-Luc Mélenchon, leader of the Insoumis, reacted very quickly on Twitter, denouncing “police violence” and judging that without the “Brav-M, without this circus, absolutely nothing would happen other than a walk in the fields.
“Jean-Luc Mélenchon and his friends are the rentiers of anger, the rentiers of the misery of the little people, and they are the shareholders of these forms of violence”, castigated Olivier Véran on Monday.
“These are people who had taken trains and planes from all over Europe to fight it out,” he said at the microphone of BFM / RMC. The government spokesperson regretted the presence of elected officials, including Clémence Guetté. “It is irresponsible, when you have a demonstration which is prohibited because it is said, there will be violent people who do not come for the ecological cause”, he lambasted.