Typically, municipal elections tend to remain local affairs. Safety and security, cleanliness, city budgets, and access to services such as health care and education top the list of civic concerns in selecting mayors. This year in France, days before its thirty-five thousand cities and towns vote in the first municipal elections since 2020, another top-line order has been added, subtly shifting electoral dynamics in local races across the country: the shadow of political violence.
On February 14, neofascist activist Quentin Deranque died, succumbing to injuries sustained two days earlier during street skirmishes between far-right groups and anti-fascists in Lyon. Video footage shows Deranque, a member of several neofascist groups, being beaten by members of the anti-fascist movement La Jeune Garde, some of whom were later revealed to be linked to Jean-Luc Mélenchon’smovement, La France Insoumise (LFI).
Taking place almost exactly one month before elections, Deranque’s death and its political repercussions have had the effect of a fragmentation bomb, sending tiny pieces of shrapnel across the country. In the weeks after his death, France’s National Assembly observed a moment of silence for the young identitarian activist; LFI, already demonized by much of the French political class, was legally qualified as a “far-left” party and had to evacuate its Paris headquarters in a credible bomb scare; bouts of retaliatory violence against left-wing institutions occurred in cities across the country from Lille in the north to Toulouse in the south; and Nazi salutes were thrown as far-right groups marched in his memory in Lyon and across the country.
This atmosphere has shifted the terms of debate in municipal races that normally focus on bread-and-butter issues onto the complex topic of political violence.
From Marseille, thirty-one-year-old theater production assistant Baptiste Colin tells me that “local debates have taken a back seat, which is a shame.”…
Auteur: Phineas Rueckert
