🇫🇷Parti Socialiste attacked by far-left
1st May protests get ugly, Gérard Darmanin wants prisoners to pay contributions, and Daniel Grenon (ex-RN) is fined €3,000 for racist comments
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This week
🌹1st May protests get ugly
👮Darmanin wants prisoners to pay contributions
💶Grenon (ex-RN) fined €3,000 for racist comments
🌹1st May protests get ugly
Every year, France sees major demonstrations take place across France on the first of May, as International Workers’ Day is celebrated, and left-wing politicians, activists, associations and NGOs (and some others) come together to demonstrate across France in favour of workers’ rights.
Firstly, the protests across France gathered together around 157,000 according to the police, with 32,000 attending the protest in Paris. Due to the law of opinions and feelings, the CGT claimed 300,000 total, and 100,000 in the capital, completely ignoring the fact that, compared to the 121,000 seen in 2024, this was already a big increase.
Bref.
Starting at 13h00, it seems that the drama started pretty much immediately, with clashes taking place around the Parti Socialiste’s stand as it was effectively swarmed by black bloc protestors, who as usual were dressed fully in black with their faces obscured, as well as many antifa protestors.
Under this atmosphere, elected officials and activists were yelled at and shoved around while these protestors chanted slogans like “everyone hates the PS”.
Naturally, with the current political climate in France, and particularly the ongoing discord between the left-wing parties, this went about as well as you can imagine, and things got heated pretty quickly, as you can see from some small snippets in the video below.
One of the biggest events, however, was the targeting of a Jewish PS deputy Jérôme Guedj, who on Sunday 27 April had to leave the ‘Rally against Islamaphobia’, organised following the assassination of a young Muslim man, due being targeted by antisemitic chanting such as “we don’t need jews with us”, “go away zionist”, and calling him a “son of a whore.”
This time, Guedj had to be physically removed from the May 1st protests for his own safety, which according to what he told the AFP, spiralled pretty quickly out of control.
“A first virulent group gave us the finger, called us 'traitors' while chanting 'Everyone hates the PS', then twenty or thirty people dressed in black, like black blocs, arrived, who went into contact. They hit people and led a charge by throwing several agricultural bombs”
- Jérôme Guedj speaking to AFP about why he left the May 1st demonstrations
He went on the offensive on Social Media with the following series of posts:
1) Like every year, with the @partisocialiste, alongside employees and trade unions for May Day. It was festive and demanding.
And then the decerebrate morons, pseudo-antifas and hooded in black, arrived. Insults, spitting, and finally punches and mortars.
2) All those who use violence and those who trivialise it are the enemies of May Day, of workers and, more broadly, of the Republic. We will never give in.
Our full support goes to our injured comrades, and our thanks go to our friends in the PS security service for their composure.
3) And to the forces of law and order for their effective and forceful intervention.
Social democracy, republican order, peaceful debate: these violent morons hate it all. Like the vulgar fascists they are.
This continued throughout the event, with Socialist MEP Emma Rafowicz explaining on BFM.TV that “activists who claim to be on the left, of the extreme left (...), first began to insult us as 'dirty Zionists', 'genocidaires', 'traitors', these are words that were spoken. They insulted all the socialists…Jérôme Guedj himself has once again been the target of anti-Semitic insults.”
One of the deputies involved, Chloé Ridel, reacted quickly after the event, posting on Twitter about what had happened.
“Today at the 1 May demonstration, the Socialists were holding a festive fixed point on the Boulevard de l'Hôpital in Paris. They tore down our flags and banners, kicked, punched and threw firecrackers. A comrade was dragged and lynched to the ground, and another elected member was injured. Our security staff bravely defended us until the police arrived. Our stand was destroyed.
I cannot find strong enough words to condemn the hatred and violence we faced. Shame on those who claim to be the people and march on Labour Day to attack other activists.
We will not be intimidated.”
Jewish PS MEP Raphel Glucksmann was likewise targeted during the 1st of may protests, with young La France Insoumise and Communists members physically ejecting him from the demonstrations in Saint-Etienne, with his security service being forced to protect him as he was targeted with projectiles, spray paint, and other tools.
According to reports, he had been at the demonstration for less than forty minutes before being targeted with yelling from certain demonstrators, such as “à bas le parti socialo”, “P comme pourri et S comme salaud” and “Glucksmann casse-toi, Sainté n’est pas à toi.”
And while Glucksmann tried to avoid the blame game, his colleague in the European Parliament, Pierre Jouvet, made a point of highlighting that he had seen "Palestinian flags, [....] flags of the Young Communists, [and] La France Insoumise."
PS Regional Councillor, Johann Cesa, went as far as to directly blame the LFI deputy for Saint-Etienne, Andrée Taurinya for actively directing her militants to target Glucksmann, and called her to take credit for the violence they experience when speaking to France Bleu:
“I saw her. Many of us saw her directing the young activists towards us. So that she should take responsibility for her actions rather than try to evade it herself. There is, in addition, one of [LFI’s] members who was a candidate in the legislative elections (Lionel Jamon) who publicly assumed this behaviour on television. That's not what democratic debate is about”
Aside from one of two interviews, Glucksmann posted only the following tweet on the topic.
“From now on, extremists will attack socialists and ‘Zionists’ at every demonstration?
Total solidarity with @JeromeGuedj, the elected representatives and activists who came to defend workers' rights and were violently attacked today.
The sectarians will not win.”
Meanwhile, Jean-Luc Mélenchon very naturally took offence to all of this and went on the attack
“Raphaël Glucksmann, apologise! You blamed LFI for your expulsion from the 1 May demonstration. We denied it. You and your PS leaders continued on the basis of your accusations. The [young communists] in 42 [La Loire] claimed responsibility for this action. After those of the North at Fabien Roussel. Respect your opponents by learning to recognise them.”
Marine Tondelier, the recently re-elected national secretary of the Ecologists, likewise put her foot in it when questioned late on thursday on whether the attack on Guedj was antisemitic, responding with one of the most baffling responses we’ve seen lately live on RTL.
“I don't want to answer that question. I'm annoyed... because no one should be excluded from demonstrations, but I also see how Jérôme Guedj gives appointments, comes with twenty journalists”
Naturally, this went down like a lead balloon, with a wide outcry that forced her to retract these ham-fisted comments in a tweet where she stated that “Jerome Guedj, like all socialists and demonstrators, should be able to do so in peace” and claimed that he had “tried to call him this morning and will try again later in the morning”
But most importantly, stated that “as for whether there is far-left anti-Semitism, the answer is yes. As there is in society as a whole, by the way.”
But the finger-pointing didn’t stop at party-on-party engagements, and continued internally, with Olivier Faure having claimed on twitter that he had “called the witnesses and victims of the Black Bloc attack in Paris” and sent a message of “full support and solidarity of all socialists” to those affected, explaining that the party was lodging complaints.
The problem is that he apparently forgot Jérôme Guedj, who very quickly responded to his party leader’s statement:
“Unfortunately not @faureolivier. Not a single call yesterday or since Sunday for the PS spokesperson that I am. Nor any condemnation of @marinetondelier's extremely serious comments.
Thank you to all the others, attached to the republican and social values that I hold dear, for their support.”
And after all of this, the Minister of the Interior, Bruno Retailleau (LR) highlighted that “The police intervened to secure the scene and make arrests" amongst all of this, and added that he would “not back down in the face of the political violence that the far left is trying to install in our country … I want to denounce those who have this kind of violent practices and who target perfectly democratic parties,"
These were accompanied by the CGT general secretary denouncing the violence as appalling.
All of this is linked to the ongoing issues that have hamstrung the left for a long time, with the far-left element frequently resorting to aggressive and violent rhetoric, explaining away the behaviour of the black bloc and other actors as not their problem.
As long-term readers of The French Dispatch, you will have read much of the reporting done regarding the behaviour of bad actors across society, as well as within the Assemblée National, with extremist behaviour actively sapping trust in democracy, and damaging political discourse in general.
This is one of the major reasons why Olivier Faure, after years of attempting to benefit from the alliance with the LFI, is now actively racing to create a new left-wing union without the far-left LFI or its firebrand leader Mélenchon.
As discussed in recent Weekly Dispatches, Faure has an uphill battle to fight, with polling not being in his favour and bigger issues on his plate, such as his re-election bid versus a pro-Melenchon candidate.
But will he succeed? Nobody can quite tell you, as the Left is clearly severely divided, even in terms of how they deal with elected officials being physically attacked and targeted in increasingly unacceptable ways, which will do nothing to help with any union or alliance.
And they only have one year and eleven months to go until the next presidential elections.
👮Darmanin wants prisoners to pay contributions
Aside from the increasingly fratricidal left, the right has been up to their own fair share of shenanigans, with Minister of Justice, Gérald Darmanin, coming out with a curious proposal for funding the French prison system.
With prisons costing around 10 million euros a day, and around four billion euros a year according to Darmanin, he is proposing that French prisoners pay a flat contribution that would cover the costs of their incarcerations, or at least a portion of this.
He justified this by explaining, live on TF1, that “Until 2003, inmates contributed to the costs of incarceration. As there is a hospital fee, there was a fee for presence in the prison,” with experts having provided some more context about this previous programme, stating that this was mostly a tax on the prisoners who worked.
Now, while this sounds like a good idea, especially in the context of a French budget that is under scrutiny, there are several big issues: what exactly are prisoners going to be able to pay a contribution with? And what will be done with those who can’t pay?
One way this could be done would be to effectively force all prisoners to engage in public work in some way, but then you run into the issue of effectively resurrecting the old chain gangs that we remember from ye olde movies, which would itself raise concerns about prisoner safety and human rights issues.
And Darmanin has been tackled by several politicians regarding the lack of thought behind this idea, with ongoing issues such as a lack of prison housing, overcrowding, and the need for more effective rehabilitation efforts, on top of other issues.
But when we get more information on this proposal, you’ll be amongst the first to know.
💶Former-RN deputy fined €3,000 for racist comments
Moving further to the right, a former deputy from the Rassemblement National, who was ejected by the party for racist comments, has now been fined €3,000 for said racist comments by a criminal court.
Back in July 2024, during the two-round legislative elections where debates on dual nationals were raging, Daniel Grenon decided to come out with an outrageous statement during a live debate organised by the newspaper l’Yonne Républicaine:
“There are people from the Maghreb who have come to power, become ministers and so on. So I feel that these people have no place in high places. So that's that. Well, after that, the bi-national North African has his place in France. They do. But not in high places.”
The court also awarded damages of €1,500 to each of the three civil parties, the Mouvement contre le racisme et pour l'amitié entre les peuples (MRAP), the Ligue des droits de l'homme (Human Rights League) and the Ligue internationale contre le racisme et l'antisémitisme (International League against Racism and Anti-Semitism).
To the credit of the majority of people involved, the condemnations were almost unanimous, with Jordan Bardella having come out publicly after the statement and calling the remarks “despicable” and made it clear that he personally considered Grenon to be one of the parties “black sheep”, before ejecting him from the RN.
Having won re-election in 2024, he has sat amongst the non-inscrits since his ejection from the party.
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Thank You Julien. Sometime I feel that people have too much time on their hands, and other actors use these people's time for their own purposes. ( my take)
After this past week vote in Canada's federal elections. Albertans who were upset at the results of the election, staged a pro separatist rally in Edmonton? I think a hundred or two people showed up.
"Darmanin being Darmanin" x)