Brown, the trendy color of winter 2022. Incidents at the initiative of small groups of the radical far right have multiplied in recent weeks in many cities in France, in particular against left-wing activists. At the end of November, the newspaper Release listed “around thirty degradations or attacks committed since the start of the school year”nearly one every two days.
Latest provocation to date: on December 7, at Bordeaux-Montaigne University in Pessac (Gironde), around twenty hooded individuals and “armed with iron bars”, according to the university, are trying to interrupt a conference given by two deputies from La France insoumise (LFI), before intimidating organizers and spectators of a play. The elected officials, Louis Boyard and Carlos Martens Bilongo, filed a complaint, like the university, which is also the target of racist or royalist-inspired tags.
The Minister of the Interior, Gérald Darmanin, condemned the action, refraining from characterizing the political side of the perpetrators. The targets recognize each other. In a blog post published Friday, December 9, Jean-Luc Mélenchon writes: “It is time to say that the message is received five out of five. (…) No one will defend us or protect our people or our meetings. » The “rebellious” leader further calls on his movement to “Give yourself the means to cope” and to organize its own security, including “to proceed with the disarmament and identification of the aggressors”.
This Friday, a cafe in Toulouse where Carlos Martens Bilongo was to hold another public meeting was also the victim of tags. Three days earlier, an investigation was opened in Lyon after the attack on activists from La France insoumise who were towing in the street.
The bar to host our public meeting this Saturday was tagged by far-right activists with sl… https://t.co/JCteR76BXl
“The mobilizing enemy that the left was no longer”
Nicolas Lebourg, historian of the far right at the University of Montpellier, notes the return of violence targeting left-wing activists, which has largely disappeared since the beginning of the 1980s at the expense of immigrants and Jews. “Vis-à-vis the socialists, the extreme right had contempt. With La France insoumise, she rediscovers hatredexplains Nicolas Lebourg. LFI is the mobilizing enemy that the left no longer was, because in its eyes it symbolizes “Islamo-leftism”. »
The extreme right thus takes up the discourse held by skinheads in the 1980s, according to which the left defends foreign invasion and not the working classes. In Mérignac (Gironde), a local CGT was recently covered with the inscription “Traitors to our people”while in Toulouse, one of the tags compared LFI to “collaborators”. Already in 2018, Europol’s report on terrorism noted a wave of violence targeting not only refugees but also left-wing activists.
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