One more. Jean-Luc Mélenchon no longer misses an opportunity to hit the cops, accusing them this time of behaving like killers, and treating one of their unions, Alliance, as a sect composed of rebels. We know that whoever aspires to be the next Prime Minister is accustomed to excess. This is the disadvantage, when you pride yourself on being a tribune, you can sometimes let yourself be carried away by the power of words. We also know that he has a dispute with the police and the gendarmes, since his famous “La République, c’est moi”, yelled in the face of a member of the police during a search in the premises of La France insoumise.
But this time, the terms chosen are incredibly violent. Because, what does Jean-Luc Mélenchon say? It does not say “police officers killed”, which would be the right way to describe the dramatic events that took place this weekend in Paris. No, he says: “The police kill”, which is a way of bringing the accusation to the whole police world, which would thus have, with impunity, the license to kill. It is the same semantic shift as when he speaks of police violence, a formula which suggests that the police are intrinsically, viscerally violent.
Jean-Luc Mélenchon is not on his first attack
The demonstrations of the Yellow Vests, their ultra-violent outbursts and the injuries that this had caused among the demonstrators, had already given him fertile raw material to break the cop. More recently, he distinguished himself during the presidential election campaign by denouncing “a police force that does what it wants when it wants”.
At the beginning of May, after the election, therefore, he had continued in the same vein by accusing the Alliance union, already him, of demanding “the right to be able to shoot people without the Minister of the Interior saying a word “. This weekend, he even took it twice to attack those he accuses of being killer cops. It is indeed a deliberate strategy.
What purpose ?
Do politics. For a fringe of the French population, the police are always presumed guilty. Guilty of violence, racism, racial control, guilty of being a state within a state, of harboring sectarian unions within them, defending a fascistic vision of society. Of course, there are a few black sheep among the police, surely crooks, maybe trigger-happy.
But are they “the” police? Obviously not. Are they above the law? Obviously not. Are they punished when they slip? Obviously yes. This stigmatization of the cops, this denunciation of structural violence speaks to this fringe of the population, and that is what interests Jean-Luc Mélenchon.
The so-called future Prime Minister finds there part of his electoral reserve, young people of immigrant origin who see themselves as victims of State racism, militants of the left of the left hostile to anything that bears a uniform, without forgetting some weak spirits for whom the cop is necessarily a budding dictator.
Three out of four French people appreciate their police
This is the big flaw in the Mélenchon strategy. To be Prime Minister, it is better to give pledges to those French people who want a country in which the law is respected. To lead a country like France, it is better not to be the adversary of the forces of order.
Manuel Bompard, one of Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s relatives at the head of La France insoumise, understood this well: he explained that his party was not anti-cop. But too late, the damage was done, and done again: for Mélenchon, the police kill. This is what risks opening the eyes of a lot of voters on the left, sincerely Republicans these ones, who can now understand that this conception of the State is not theirs and that, decidedly, a “Prime Minister” shouldn’t say that.