EDITORIAL. Gérald Darmanin wants to send the hot potato of ultra-right demonstrations to justice

Never again ! Never again a parade of gloved and masked activists, waving black flags marked with the Celtic cross and chanting “Europa! Youth ! Revolution !“in the streets of Paris, as we saw last Saturday. A show”unacceptable” for Gérald Darmanin who therefore instructed the prefects to issue prohibition orders. A spectacular reversal of the executive since the day before, the prefect of police of Paris, Laurent Nuñez, “assumed“for not having issued such an order, for lack of a legal reason to do so.

>> Gérald Darmanin asks the prefects to ban all ultra-right demonstrations after the one held in Paris on Saturday

He was therefore disavowed by his minister for political reasons: firstly because the government no longer wants the left to accuse him of being more lenient with the extreme right than with the casserolades hostile to the leader of the State. And then on the side of the place Beauvau, we are annoyed to be accused by the opposition of sometimes trampling on legality, as for example, during the evacuation of a slum suspended by a court in Mayotte at the end of April.

What will the court say?

Gérald Darmanin therefore wants to return the hot potato of these far-right parades to justice. “We’ll let the courts judge“, he thus said Tuesday, May 9. A way of opening the umbrella. But it is not certain that his promise will be systematically followed by effects. And basically, in the majority as in the opposition , nobody really believes in it. Because a demonstration can only be banned if it presents a real danger, if individuals commit violence, or call for violence or hatred, especially racial hatred. We cannot either more manifest the concealed face.

But justice cannot ban a parade on principle, because it would be far-right, a legally vague concept. Appeals to the courts therefore risk very often overturning the future decrees of the prefects. Between the overplayed indignation of the opposition, which has been calling for the banning of a demonstration authorized each year for more than 25 years, and the untenable rantings of a minister, it is to be feared that this controversy will above all make the happiness of a few ultra-right groups in need of notoriety.