PARIS (AP) — Candidates in France’s crucial and polarizing parliamentary elections made their final push Friday for the second and decisive round of voting after a three-week campaign marked by hate speech, verbal abuse and physical attacks.
French Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin said his ministry had recorded 51 verbal and physical attacks against candidates, their deputies or their supporters during the campaign for the crucial parliamentary elections that end with the second round of voting on Sunday. Several of the attacks were “extremely serious,” Darmanin said in an interview with French broadcaster BFM on Friday.
At least 30 suspects “from very diverse backgrounds” have been arrested, the interior minister said, adding that candidates and their supporters from across the French political spectrum have been the target of verbal and physical violence.
“The Rassemblement National candidates were violently attacked… (as were) left-wing candidates,” Darmanin said.
Tensions are running high as left-wing and moderate groups try to prevent the anti-immigration, nationalist Rassemblement National from winning an absolute majority in the legislature, a first and a major historic change for France.
Rassemblement National, led by party president Jordan Bardella, won the most votes in the first round of the June 30 parliamentary elections. But that was not enough to secure an outright victory and enable the formation of the first far-right government in France since World War II.
Darmanin said 30,000 police officers would be deployed on Sunday, including 5,000 in the Paris region, to ensure the election results “are respected, whatever they may be.” He said gatherings outside the National Assembly, the lower house of parliament, were banned.
A group called Anti-Fascist Action Paris-Suburbs has called for a protest outside the National Assembly on Sunday evening as the results come in.
Many people have expressed concern that growing voter support for the anti-immigration National Rassemblement has made people more comfortable using racist, xenophobic and anti-Semitic language in public.
The government agency that tracks racist acts had no recent data since the short campaign began.
Candidates have complained about hate speech and physical violence during the campaign.
Government spokeswoman Prisca Thevenot, who is running for the centrist Ensemble alliance led by President Emmanuel Macron, said she and a deputy and a party activist were putting up election posters in Meudon, near Paris, on Wednesday night when a mob attacked them. Thevenot’s deputy and the party activist were taken to hospital.
Macron called surprise parliamentary elections on June 9 after his alliance suffered a heavy defeat to France’s Rassemblement National in the European Parliament vote, plunging the country into a sudden legislative campaign.
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