French elections: Attack on Macron’s spokesman’s team shows tensions in French electoral campaign | International

The attack on the campaign team of French government spokeswoman and deputy candidate Prisca Thevenot while putting up election posters in Meudon, on the outskirts of Paris, on Wednesday night highlighted the tensions that have been simmering in France for some days ahead of legislative elections on Sunday that could bring the far right to power for the first time.

Outgoing Prime Minister Gabriel Attal immediately denounced the attack, saying “violence and intimidation have no place in our democracy.” The attack injured Thevenot’s deputy’s arm and broke the jaw of one of his aides. From a television set, the main candidate of the extreme right, Jordan Bardella, also expressed “his full support” for Thevenot and called for “calm and appeasement” in the remaining hours of the campaign until midnight on Friday.

As Thevenot himself explained to the newspaper Le Parisian The attack took place this Thursday when he, together with his deputy and the campaign team, decided to go out to put up some election posters. “Everything happened very quickly,” said the government spokesman. His team was accompanied by “a small group of young people, about ten” who were “destroying” the posters. When he drew their attention, he “attacked” one of his colleagues, “incidentally injuring” his deputy Virginie Lanlo. Both were immediately taken to the hospital, while Thevenot filed a complaint at the police station. The Nanterre prosecutor’s office has launched an investigation for “group violence against an elected official” and four people have been arrested, three of them minors, the capital’s newspaper said.

Attacks on legislative candidates, a phenomenon experienced in other European countries during previous European Parliament elections, have increased in France in recent days.

Hours before the attack on Thevenot, Marie Douchy, the National Rally (RN) candidate for Bardella in Savoy, in the east of the country, also told Aix that she was suspending her campaign after suffering a “violent attack” at a local market, according to the newspaper. Sudouestthe attacker is in preventive detention for “repeated death threats, insults and vile violence”. On Monday, Nicolas Conquer, the candidate for the Conservative Republicans (LR) party division in Cherbourg, who has aligned himself with the extreme right, also suffered an attack, as he reported Figaro“about a dozen young people between 25 and 30 years old” began throwing “stones and various objects picked up from the street” at him and his team, yelling insults. One projectile hit a minor, as well as Conquer, who said he received several projectiles from behind. Four people were arrested and charged with “mass violence”.

Despite the growing complaints of these acts, Thierry Clair, secretary general of the police union Unsa-Police, rejected this Thursday that this is a situation of unusual violence. “The atmosphere gets heated” during the electoral period, he said on the France Info station, but this is not a new phenomenon, he stressed. However, he acknowledged an increase not only in physical attacks but also in verbal attacks during this legislative campaign, in which, according to various politicians in recent days and weeks, the strong arrival of the extreme right has opened the door to racist and xenophobic discourse in a part of society. Reports of verbal or physical attacks against French people of immigrant origin have multiplied in the press and not only among candidates, but also against ordinary citizens. French President Emmanuel Macron condemned from Brussels last week the “uninhibited racism or anti-Semitism” being experienced during the campaign.

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