France to
deploy 30,000 police after election runoff amid fears of violence
Move comes
after attacks on government spokesperson and RN candidate in buildup to
Sunday’s poll
Angelique
Chrisafis in Paris and agencies
Thu 4 Jul
2024 13.21 BST
About 30,000
police will be deployed across France on Sunday night amid fears of violence
after the final results of a snap election in which the far right hopes to gain
a majority in parliament.
Gérald
Darmanin, the interior minister, said 5,000 police would be on duty in Paris
and its surrounding areas to “ensure that the radical right and radical left do
not take advantage of the situation to cause mayhem”.
Four people,
including one under 18, were arrested after the government spokesperson, Prisca
Thevenot, said she and her team had been attacked on Wednesday evening while
putting up campaign posters in Meudon, outside Paris.
Her deputy
and a party activist were injured after the team told a group of about 10
youths to stop defacing campaign posters. “We said to them, without being
aggressive, that [defacing posters] was not allowed,” Thevenot told Le
Parisien. She said police arrived less than five minutes after the attack.
“Violence is
never the answer. I’ll continue my on-the-ground campaigning,” Thevenot wrote
on X.
A few hours
before being targeted, she had shared her anxiety as a person of colour in a
“complicated” political climate with French broadcaster TF1.
“I don’t say
this only as spokesperson of the government, but more as the daughter of
immigrants and mother of mixed-race children,” Thevenot said, citing repeated
and intensified racist attacks. “They no longer do it anonymously, but with
uncovered faces and even with a certain pride.”
A candidate
for Marine Le Pen’s National Rally party (RN) in Savoie, Marie Dauchy, also
said she had been attacked, by a shopkeeper at a market on Wednesday.
Nicolas
Conquer, a candidate for The Republicans, said on social media that he had been
assaulted while distributing election flyers in the city of Cherbourg on
Tuesday.
“Let’s
reject the climate of violence and hatred that is taking hold,” prime minister
Gabriel Attal wrote on Thursday on X, adding that violence and intimidation had
“no place in our democracy.”
Sunday’s
decisive second round is expected to result in the far-right, anti-immigration
RN becoming the biggest party in parliament, whether or not it reaches the 289
seats needed for an absolute majority to form the next government.
Both the
centrist grouping of the president, Emmanuel Macron, and a broadleftwing
coalition, have withdrawn more than 200 candidates from the final runoff in a
joint effort to limit the far right’s seats. The exact number of seats the far
right RN and its allies could win in the 577-seat national assembly is hard to
predict, but Harris Interactive polling for Challenges magazine on Wednesday
suggested they could take up to 220.
Le Pen on
Thursday claimed the party could reach an absolute majority if voter turnout
was high.
“I think
there is still the capacity to have an absolute majority with the electorate
turning out in a final effort to get what they want,” she told BFM TV. “I say
turn out to vote, as it’s a really important moment to get a change in politics
in all the areas that are making you suffer right now.”
Associated
Press contributed to this report.
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