A French mayor and member of populist Marine Le Pen’s National Rally (RN) has expressed anger after requiring police protection to attend a wedding due to threats from an individual recently released from prison.
National Rally politician Julien Sanchez, the mayor of Beaucaire, denounced French “judicial laxity” on social media, claiming that he required a police escort comprising of around 15 officers in order to safely attend a recent wedding after he had received threats from an individual released from prison at the start of the summer.
“There were about fifteen police officers, including national police officers, quite simply because an individual released from prison at the beginning of the summer decided to terrorize the inhabitants of several communes of Gard and Bouches-du- Rhone,” Sanchez stated, broadcaster France Bleu reports.
According to Sanchez, the man in question has been linked to shooting a man in Tarascon and attacking several people in Nîmes, Bagnols-sur-Cèze and Beaucaire. He is even said to have fired a Kalashnikov rifle at a building occupied by a family in Beaucaire, of which one of the sons was the groom at the wedding attended by Sanchez.
“I have a question: What is Emmanuel Macron doing? What is [Justice Minister] Éric Dupont-Moretti doing? What is [Interior Minister] Gérald Darmanin doing? […] they are doing nothing. Mobilize and demand accountability from those who govern us. They are there for that, they owe us security,” he said.
Growing insecurity remains a major problem in France and has been for several years, with a 2017 survey revealing that 59 per cent of the French public do not feel safe anywhere in the country, while 69 per cent said they believed the police and gendarmerie were understaffed.
Insecurity and urban violence is so prolific across France that a letter signed by 20 former French generals and 1,000 active duty and former soldiers warned the country risks civil conflict if the government does not act against growing trends of crime and other security issues, such as Islamic extremism.
“As we can see, it is no longer time to procrastinate. Otherwise, tomorrow, the civil war will put an end to this growing chaos, and the dead, for whom you will bear responsibility, will count in the thousands,” the letter said.
Following the letter, a poll found that nearly half of the French would support the military intervening to restore security in France, even if the government of the day did not request them to do so. A further 86 per cent said they believed that French laws did not apply everywhere within French territory.