Lille: Mélenchon holds his meeting on Palestine in the street, his supporters worry about their freedom of expression

Finally, the meeting was held outdoors. After having suffered a new ban on meetings around Palestine in Lille, Jean-Luc Mélenchon finally summoned his supporters for a meeting to call for peace in Palestine, in a square in a working-class district of Lille on Thursday evening, in the company of European candidate Rima Hassan, head of the list Manon Aubry and other LFI elected officials.

On the square, an improvised platform, a hastily installed sound system. Jean-Luc Mélenchon, with microphone in hand, criticizes “an abuse of power of a banana republic” which forces him to hold this meeting in the open air. “To ban us is to cross an incredible threshold of political violence,” he chanted in front of a thousand sympathizers, particularly angry.

“We are mobilizing fully”

“There, we are trying to create a very dangerous precedent for our democracy and for public freedoms. And that’s why we’re mobilizing fully”, judges a young woman at the microphone of Europe 1. “In any case, at the moment, the government is in the hands of Israel”, judges for her shares another activist. The executive is accused by Jean-Luc Mélenchon of wanting to prevent free speech in favor of peace. “As we speak, people are bombing hospitals and if we are here, it is. to protest against this massacre, to cry for a ceasefire,” he proclaims in the small Lille square.

No overflow observed

Because asking to stop the massacre is not being anti-Semitic, assures Théophile. “To be accused of being anti-Semitic makes us angry. It makes us angry and there is a little fierceness about it which is outrageous,” he judges. In total, Jean-Luc Mélenchon spoke for around forty minutes, without any excesses being noted. No doubt a way of demonstrating that the bans were unnecessary.