Antivax, conspirators or enemies of the Republic, the COVID-19 pandemic has given a boost to the ideas of the ultra-right in France. To the point that police, magistrates and intelligence services now fear the passage to the act of one of their supporters.
In a climate of disputes and disparate anger less than three months before the first round of the presidential election in this country, their activism is closely watched by the authorities.
In less than a year, the government has dissolved two small groups, the Zouaves Paris and Alvarium, as well as an association, Generation Identity, which all claim to be ultra-right, a police term designating a protean movement.
These measures did not prevent some from ostensibly inviting themselves to a procession against the vaccine passport on January 15 in Paris, despite a judicial control prohibiting them from doing so.
“Dissolution is not a panacea, but it makes them feel insecure, prevents them from moving upmarket,” argues a senior police officer. More skeptical, Jean-Yves Camus, a researcher specializing in the far right, observes that “small more local structures” are recreated as soon as the dissolution of the group is pronounced.
This abundance makes the French authorities fear an individual and targeted act. Particularly against elected officials, including parliamentarians who approved the health passport and then the vaccine passport, which came into force on Monday.
The Minister of the Interior, Gérald Darmanin, no longer hides his concern.
“Serious threats”
“I asked the prefects to protect elected officials as we protect places of worship… The climate of this campaign is not serene”, he told the Sunday newspaper last weekend.
“Threats against elected officials are a very big concern,” confirms a high-ranking police officer. Since July, the Ministry of the Interior has recorded more than 500 “acts of serious threats” (death threats) against them and more than 400 complaints.
So far, none has resulted in an attack on their life or their physical integrity. But the police are worried about the formation of structured and clandestine cells which aim to “overthrow” the institutions through violence.
Currently, the National Anti-Terrorist Prosecutor’s Office (PNAT) is managing “nine judicial files” linked to the ultra-right. “Six concern these clandestine cells […] and three, individual projects,” said a security source.
“It’s a fairly large number,” says Laurent Nunez, the national coordinator of intelligence and the fight against terrorism.
“We are no longer in the presence of a marginal phenomenon, but of a phenomenon that is gaining momentum”, confirms the boss of the PNAT, Jean-François Ricard.
“Great replacement” theory
“So far, France has been spared,” rejoices a senior police officer, however. But other countries have been hit.
In June 2021, in Canada, four members of the same Muslim family were killed by a man who ran his car into them. Two years earlier in New Zealand, an Australian supremacist opened fire at two mosques in Christchurch, killing 51 Muslims.
Both men can be categorized as ultra-right. “It’s a catch-all category where we put the far right extraparliamentary, activist, which does not necessarily mean terrorist, everything to the right of the RN” (far right party National Rally), summarizes Jean-Yves Camus.
Its proponents share the same hatred of foreigners, Muslims, Jews or Freemasons.
From the jihadist attacks of 2015 and the immigration+r%C3%A9fugi%C3%A9s”>migration crisis, the ideas of the “great replacement” took hold in the French movement, strong of around 3,000 people. an “imminent danger” and an “incapable” state, explains a security source.
Currents from the United States, such as the “supremacists”, “accelerationists” or “survivalists”, then germinated there, joined by certain members of the popular revolt movement of the “Yellow Vests” (which had shaken the five-year term of Emmanuel Macron in 2018 and 2019), who switched to “radicality, found themselves and structured”, continues the same source.
“Terrorist Process”
The health crisis served as a catalyst for this magma and “we have seen anti-system theories like those of QAnon develop in France”, adds the same source.
Jean-Yves Camus estimates at “a few thousand the number” of these militants “very oriented towards violence”. A security source reports “10 to 100 profiles likely to take action”.
Groups “seek to carry out demonstrative actions”, for example “by participating in demonstrations to make them degenerate”, explains Laurent Nunez. This was the case on January 15 during an “antivax” procession in Paris, where AFP journalists were threatened with death.
Others organize fights against antifa” or illegal actions, such as Identity Generation with “border controls”, he continues. They behave like “private militias”, “incite hatred”, but “are not in the process of passing the terrorist act”.
Conversely, adds Mr. Nunez, the clandestine cells “are engaged in a process of terrorism, of challenging representative institutions” or of “fighting against Islam and the ‘leftists’”.
Since 2017, “six plans to take action on the far right” have been thwarted, according to Mr. Darmanin.
Like the jihadists, they display “more and more professionalism”, “projects which are becoming clearer” in “the choice of targets, the mode of operation, the structuring”, notes a judicial source specializing in the fight against terrorism.
Access to weapons
“The psychological springs are the same: frustration, need for recognition, fascination with ultra-violence. But there are quite a few differences,” said a senior police official.
Jean-Yves Camus also notes that to date, there has been no plan for an attack on the part of the ultra-right “equivalent to the gas cylinders” that they wanted to blow up near Notre-Dame de Paris. young girls adept in jihad.
Many weapons have been discovered in several cases involving the ultra-right, most of them legally owned.
Many of the supporters of the ultra-right are hunters, ex-soldiers, collectors or sports shooters and have little recourse to the circuits used by serious crime.
However, they have “easy access to weapons through their relations with international neo-Nazi movements”, notes a judicial source.
Prototype of these followers of the ultra-right ready to take the plunge, a former soldier is on trial from Wednesday in Paris for “individual terrorist enterprise”. Arrested in 2020, he had weapons and had just published disturbing messages in support of Nazism which suggested an imminent attack on the Jewish community.
With the Investigations Department of Agence France-Presse