Three days before the second round of historic legislative elections, incidents are piling up in a France under very high tension, which could swing to the extreme right or become ungovernable due to the lack of a clear majority on Sunday.
Fears of the far right coming to power for the first time in 80 years prompted the captain of the French soccer team, Kylian Mbappé, to speak out again on Thursday and urge his compatriots to go and vote.
“It’s really urgent. We can’t put the country in the hands of these people, it’s really urgent. We’ve seen the results, it’s catastrophic,” said the striker.
The campaign, which will end on Friday, has been marked by an increase in verbal and physical clashes. In Savoie, in the Alps, the candidate of the National Rally (RN, far right) Marie Dauchy filed a complaint after being violently attacked by a trader in a market. In neighboring Isère, the former minister Olivier Véran denounced on Thursday the assault of a local elected official who was putting up posters for his campaign.
On Wednesday evening, government spokesperson Prisca Thevenot, a candidate in the Paris region, was the victim, along with her team, of an attack during a poster-posting operation.
As a sign of the general concern, the government announced that “30,000 police officers and gendarmes, including 5,000 in Paris and its suburbs” would be mobilized on Sunday for the evening of the second round.
There are also reports of an increase in racist incidents and insults in the country since the start of this campaign, launched after the surprise dissolution decided by President Macron on the evening of June 9, after the victory of the extreme right in the European elections.
An outgoing MP from Burgundy (centre) thus let slip that a “binational Maghrebi” did not have “his place in the high places” of power while a candidate judged it “completely false” that the RN was racist by claiming that she herself has “as an ophthalmologist a Jew and […] Another said there was nothing “anti-Semitic” about saying that the gas chambers were a detail of World War II.
Violence is also spreading online. The courts were called in after a far-right website called for the “elimination” of lawyers who signed an anti-RN column.
Asked about these excesses, the leading figure of the extreme right, Marine Le Pen, made a distinction between “remarks which are unacceptable and which will most certainly lead to sanctions” and “remarks which are blunders” in the face of the “grand inquisitors of the press”.
The RN candidates are “good people,” she said.
“When it’s one candidate in three for whom we have problematic remarks, it’s not a few black sheep, it’s the whole flock that is sick,” Prime Minister Gabriel Attal mocked on France 2 on Thursday evening.
Republican Front
The momentum in favour of the RN, which came out on top in the first round last Sunday, could be slowed by the 200 or so withdrawals of candidates from the right, centre-right and left, agreed to prevent the far right from governing in France for the first time in 80 years.
Angered by this new “republican front”, Marine Le Pen denounced on Thursday the establishment of a “single party” bringing together “those who want to retain power against the will of the people”.
And the party president Jordan Bardella waved the threat of a paralyzed France. “Either the National Rally obtains an absolute majority and I can, from Sunday, initiate the recovery project that I am carrying […]”Or the country is blocked,” summed up the man who sees himself as prime minister on Thursday on France 2.
The Association of Emergency Physicians of France (AMUF), among other organizations, called on Thursday to “block” the far right “to protect our health system”, after several columns signed by thousands of other caregivers, also worried about the fate of foreign doctors in the event of a victory of the far right.
According to the latest polls, the possibility of the RN gaining an absolute majority of 289 deputies seems to be fading.
The National Rally and its allies would obtain between 210 and 240 seats at the end of the second round of the legislative elections, according to a poll by the Ifop institute published on Thursday.
But, everywhere in France, left-wing voters are hesitant to once again block the far right.
“Macron was elected by left-wing votes. He should have made concessions to the left, but he only made concessions to the right,” regrets Michel, 66, in front of a fruit and vegetable stand in Calvados, in the west of the country.
A former schoolteacher, Claude will resign herself to voting for the Macronist camp, worried about those who want to “try out” the extreme right. “The voting booth is not a dressing room,” she says.
Despite these calls for a blockade, the young president of the RN Jordan Bardella believes in the victory of his camp, which would propel him to the post of prime minister at 28 years old.
On the other side, the left-wing coalition of the New Popular Front (NFP) and the Macronist camp (centre-right) are taking advantage of this to warn of the danger of the extreme right. But, barring an improbable shift, neither of these two blocs will obtain a clear majority on Sunday, at the risk of making the country ungovernable one month before the Paris Olympics.
To escape the paralysis, some centre-right and left-wing leaders are considering a broad cross-party coalition, common in Germany but unprecedented in France.
The contours of such an alliance remain extremely vague, however, and seven years of Macron’s rule have dug deep political divides.
with the AFP political service