Police officers call for military intervention to restore law and order in France

In a rare move in France, all the police unions, 14 organizations in total, agreed to stage a common demonstration on Wednesday, May 19, in front of the French National Assembly to protest against the violence and murders of which police officers are increasingly victims. They also directed their ire against the excessive leniency of judges and the inaction of political leaders.

Many citizens joined the demonstration to support them, resulting in protests that swelled to tens of thousands of people. Most political parties were also represented, apart from the far left, and several personalities also came to express their support for the police, such as the actor Gérard Lanvin or the journalist and writer Éric Zemmour. Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin tried to join the police at the protest to express his support, but he was whistled and booed.

The last straw was the recent murder of a policeman shot at point-blank range by a drug dealer during a check in the southern city of Avignon, and the assassination of an administrative employee at the Rambouillet police station, near Paris, by a Tunisian jihadist who was, in fact, one of the many illegal immigrants whose stay had finally been regularized. The woman had her throat cut by the Muslim terrorist at the entrance to the police station. Recent court rulings have also shocked police officers and members of the public, such as the weak sentences issued in the case against the 13 young men who attacked and burned alive police officers in their car in Viry-Châtillon, also in the suburbs of Paris, in 2016.

The justice system in France is dominated by a very leftist union, the Syndicat de la Magistrature, whose members foster a culture of excuse and leniency to the extreme and consider that prison is generally not a solution. The other issue is the overall lack of prison space, as the construction of new prisons had been suspended under the presidency of Macron’s predecessor and mentor, François Hollande, for ideological reasons, which means that sentences are only partially executed or not executed at all.

Some police officers fully share the diagnosis made by a number of military officers who, in a series of open letters, recently warned the political class against the risk of civil war in France.