EDITORIAL. How the far right blows on the embers of the murder of young Thomas

The small town of Romans-sur-Isère in Drôme was the scene of violent incidents caused by the ultra-right on Saturday evening, a week after the death of a teenager.

Saturday, November 25 in the evening, 80 ultra-right activists claimed to avenge, in some way, the murder of Thomas, this young 16-year-old boy, stabbed during the attack on a popular ball in the town of Crépol, in about fifteen kilometers away. These activists wanted to invest in the Romans district from which most of the nine suspects arrested and indicted came. They launched a sort of manhunt and attacked the police. Such a punitive expedition is extremely rare and it illustrates the deterioration of the political climate.

We should not overestimate the threat of the ultra-right with around 2,000 individuals across the country, most of them known to the services and sometimes on S files, but it exists. Gérald Darmanin has already warned of the risk of ultra-right attacks, dissolved certain small groups and banned rallies or public meetings. Because what is new is that this identity movement now dares to come out into the open. Saturday evening, in the streets of Romans, we heard slogans like “France belongs to us” Or “Islam outside Europe!”in recent days racist tags have also defaced several mosques, in short, the ultra-right parade, with the tacit complicity of far-right parties.

Political recovery of the far right

Éric Zemmour and his Reconquest movement brandish the foreign-sounding first names of the suspects to denounce what they call “a Francocide”. Their Lepéniste twin brothers from the RN accuse the media and the justice system of minimizing the tragedy of Crépol, while nine young people have already been arrested and indicted for “murder by an organized gang”. The two far-right parties accuse the government, and beyond that the State, of “protect the scum”.

The murder of young Thomas is of course a tragic news item. It is undoubtedly also a social fact because it illustrates the rise of a form of ultra-violence, this “decivilization” against which Emmanuel Macron warned a few months ago. But the Zemmouro-Lepéniste extreme right wants to go further, draw ethnic conclusions to make it a political fact. In short, blowing on the embers of the identity confrontation that she is calling for to destabilize the institutions of the Republic.