The leader of La France insoumise Jean-Luc Mélenchon spoke on Saturday of his “immense disgust”, faced with the demonstrations of the ultra-right in France, judging in particular that Gérald Darmanin had “done nothing”, against “the reconstitution” of the movement of far right Generation Identity dissolved in March 2021. A gathering called by a small ultra-right group (Les Natifs) in tribute to young Thomas killed during a village festival in Drôme brought together around 200 people on Friday evening Place du Panthéon in Paris, where it was able to be held after the suspension of the prefectural ban order.
“It’s winter, it’s cold, poor people are shivering (…), it’s winter and the fascists are demonstrating with their arms outstretched, vociferous, threatening everyone, and especially those who don’t have to their eyes do not have the right skin color or the right hair quality,” Jean-Luc Mélenchon stressed on France Inter. “How is it that there are organizations in our country that can attack people, make public acts of racism, that can make Nazi salutes and the rest?” he asked. “We know who these people are,” he insisted, “it’s a reconstitution of a dissolved league.”
The Insoumis pay “dearly for this form of trivialization of the extreme right”
For him, the Minister of the Interior Gérald Darmanin “did nothing. The Generation Identity group was dissolved and reconstituted. How is it that these people are able to organize a demonstration of this nature , that’s the real problem.”
He refused to criticize the administrative court’s decision, recalling that the courts had been able to “authorize”, “at the last minute” certain “demonstrations in defense of the population of Gaza” which had been subject to a prefectural ban. “We say sometimes in left-wing demonstrations there is violence, but it is violence against property and beyond the will of the organizers,” he also noted.
Finally, he stressed that the rebels paid “dearly for this form of trivialization of the extreme right”, stressing that he had “been the subject of two assassination attempts”. “There are ten of us living under death threats, and three were attacked in the street,” he added.