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Far-right, xenophobic groups in France are increasingly using death threats and other types of intimidation as a regular tactic. Their goal is to intimidate mayors and other local authorities into not moving forward with initiatives that would welcome newcomers.
The Atlantic Coast town of Saint-Brevin-les-Pins’ mayor, Yannick Morez, made headlines last year when he abruptly resigned, shut down his medical practice, and relocated after his home and two automobiles caught fire. The March 22, 2023, arson came after months of death threats from radical right-wing individuals.
The decision to lodge migrants next to a school set off fresh demonstrations, despite the fact that they had been in the town since 2016. Dorothée Pacaud, Morez’s successor, made the relocation project possible. At Saint-Brevin-les-Pins, far-right organizations in France continued to foment anti-immigrant activities. They are now all across the nation.
Jean-Yves Rolland, the mayor of Callac, which is located more than 240 kilometers north of the town on the Atlantic coast, came under a similar attack after he chose to accept a few refugee families to cover employment openings in the hamlet.”I hope, Mr. Mayor, that your wife will be raped, your daughter will be raped, and your grandchildren will be sodomized,” says one of the messages he received, calling him a “criminal.”
Following months of protests, including thousands of out-of-town activists, Rolland abandoned its proposal to take in seven to ten refugee families in January 2023.He placed a stack of written threats on his desk at the town hall and declared, “They were clearly threatening democracy.” One person called migrants “aggressors, rapists, and dealers” who ought to be “sent back to Africa.”
Outside agitators frequently amplify these intimidation operations, which involve violence and misinformation.The far-right and far-left fringe movements’ potential for violence is causing France’s internal security service, the DGSI, to become more and more concerned. Why is the prevalence of intimidation campaigns rising?
Following the horrific attacks in 2015 and 2016 by Islamic militants, far-right groups became increasingly active.Then-DGSI chairman Nicolas Lerner stated in a rare interview with Le Monde last year that one of their objectives is to “precipitate a clash” over those perceived as outsiders.”There are serious risks to our democracies from the normalization of the use of violence and the desire to impose ideas through intimidation or fear,” he stated.
According to Lerner, social networking has helped the radical right’s violent beliefs in the US spread to Europe. According to him, political parties often “channel energy” on issues like immigration. Renowned far-right scholar Jean-Yves Camus stated that the escalated nationalist and anti-immigrant discourse in France is connected to the growth in violence from extremist organizations.
He declared, “There is a real political project that the state is confronting, beyond those anti-migrant demonstrations. “The creator of Reconquête, Eric Zemmour, has followed in the footsteps of former US President Donald Trump by criticizing elites and forecasting the disintegration of French society, despite the lack of a French heritage of distrust of a “deep state.”
The French nationalist Zemmour has no personal ties to radical organizations, according to Camus. “But he says, ‘They can be useful if they want to come with me and my party.’”