The board of directors of the Alliance police union announces Wednesday that it will file a complaint Thursday for “defamation” and “public insult” against Jean-Luc Mélenchon, leader of La France insoumise and figure of the New popular ecological union and social, for saying that the union was “factious”.
“The police were outraged, felt outraged. You can’t even imagine the hundreds of comments we had on social media, even several thousand after a few days. We couldn’t stop there,” explains to franceinfo the secretary general of Alliance, Fabien Vanhemelryck. “We don’t want to advertise such a fanatic, but now we have to fight back. (…) Every time he does this kind of slippage, we will systematically file a complaint”he warns.
The union’s lawyer, Me Laurent Benarrous, hopes that the complaints filed against Jean-Luc Mélenchon will end up being “shut up” : “We believe that by dint of filing complaints and dint of obtaining convictions, we will eventually silence him, because this man must shut up now. The police in this country can no longer stand it, can not stand it. no more being insulted. We are particularly determined.”
The lawyer explains that the words of the LFI leader resonate like a “declaration of war on the police, the policemen and the trade unions”. According to him, they incite the population not to respect the police officers and thus endanger the lives of the civil servants. During a speech at the Nupes Popular Convention on May 7, Jean-Luc Mélenchon said: “After the right to strangle, the Alliance union claims the right to be able to shoot people, without the Minister of the Interior saying a word.”
He also referred to a demonstration in which “a factional syndicate [a déclaré] that the problem of this country and the police is justice, and nobody has anything to say”. “A police force in a democratic state is necessarily republican and I don’t see what kind of traffic offense or even traffic offense deserves that one person decides on the application of the death penalty to another and that it is his right. No, it’s not possible. We don’t accept it”he said again.
Several dozen police officers mobilized on Monday May 2 in support of a police officer indicted for “manslaughter”, “willful violence by a person holding public authority resulting in death without intention to give it” and “aggravated willful violence by a person vested with public authority”. He is suspected of having fired a dozen times with an assault rifle on the three occupants of a vehicle on the night of April 24 to 25 on the Pont-Neuf in Paris.