Believing that the politicians had “lacked firmness in the face of the far left, out of intellectual complacency or cowardice”, Gérald Darmanin asserts in the Sunday newspaper that “no more ZAD (zone to defend) will settle in our country. Neither in Sainte-Soline nor elsewhere”. The Minister of the Interior announces for this the creation in Beauvau of an “anti-ZAD cell, with specialized lawyers”. She will see the light of day on September 1, according to her entourage.
While accusations are multiplying against “police violence” during demonstrations against pension reform or water retention as in Sainte-Soline, the minister also assures that he “never had a trembling hand for those who dishonor their own uniform. He thus announces that “36 judicial investigations” have been opened by the IGPN, “the police of the police”, and 2 by the IGGN (the equivalent for the gendarmes) since the start of the mobilization against the pension reform.
Defco in the sights of the minister
He also recalls that in 2021, “111” police and gendarmes had been sanctioned, and “101” in 2020, for “disproportionate use of force”. However, the Minister once again supports the police by emphasizing the violence of certain demonstrators. “At Sainte-Soline, as in certain wild demonstrations, it was not maintaining order: it was guerrilla warfare”. After the launch of the procedure for the dissolution of the movement “The Uprisings of the Earth”, one of the organizers of the Sainte-Soline demonstration, Gérald Darmanin also announced that he would do the same for Defco (Collective Defense), a movement of Rennes which “calls for an uprising”.
In total, he notes, “since March 16, 1,093 police officers, gendarmes and firefighters have been injured”. There were “2,579 arson attacks and 316 attacks on public buildings”. “When violence, thugs and the ultra-left get involved, then it is the duty of the police to say stop”, according to him. “I refuse to give in to the intellectual terrorism of the extreme left which consists in overturning values: the thugs would become the attacked and the police the aggressors”.
Charge against the Nupes
Asked about the petition calling for the dissolution of the BRAV-M (motorcycle police in Paris), which had collected more than 240,000 signatures on Saturday evening, Gérald Darmanin judges that it is “a politicized petition, relayed by rebellious France which hates the police “. As for the concerns expressed by the UN special rapporteur and the Council of Europe on the way in which force is used in France, the Minister replied: “I hear the criticisms but I encourage their authors, rather than comment on video extracts from New York or Brussels, to come to the field”.
Questioned also on the ultra-left, he assures that the intelligence services had identified “in France 2,200 S files” belonging to this movement. He denounces “a very worrying complacency of the political movements which have their entries in the National Assembly”. “I’m sounding the alarm,” he adds. According to him, the Nupes “takes the slope of this ultra-left of the 1970s”, “takes the Republican left hostage”.