As accusations of police violence multiply during demonstrations against pension reform or water reservoirs such as in Sainte-Soline (Deux-Sèvres), the Minister of the Interior, Gérald Darmanin, supports the forces of the order, in an interview with the Sunday newspaper of April 2. He also announced the creation of an “anti-ZAD” cell (“zone to defend”).

“When violence, thugs and the ultra-left get involved, then it is the duty of law enforcement to say stop,” says Mr. Darmanin. “I refuse to give in to the intellectual terrorism of the far left which consists in overthrowing values: the thugs would become the attacked and the police the aggressors”, he still maintains.

According to the Minister of the Interior, “since March 16, 1,093 police officers, gendarmes and firefighters have been injured” in the demonstrations. There were “2,579 arson attacks and 316 attacks on public buildings”.

Gérald Darmanin, however, assures that he does not have “a hand that trembles for those who dishonor their own uniform”. He recalled that in 2021, “111” police officers and gendarmes had been sanctioned, and “101” in 2020, for “disproportionate use of force”, and announced that “36 judicial investigations” had been opened by the IGPN, “the police of the police”, and two by the IGGN (the equivalent for the gendarmes) since the beginning of the mobilization against the pension reform.

Petition for disbanding BRAV-M is ‘politicized’

But at the same time, the minister insists on the violence of certain demonstrators. “At Sainte-Soline, as in some wild demonstrations, it was not policing: it was guerrilla warfare,” he said.

Believing that the politicians had “lacked firmness in the face of the far left, out of intellectual complacency or cowardice”, Mr. Darmanin affirmed that “no more ZAD will settle in our country. Neither in Sainte-Soline nor elsewhere”. And to announce the creation at the Ministry of the Interior of an “anti-ZAD cell, with specialized lawyers”. She will be born on September 1, according to those around her.

Asked about the petition calling for the dissolution of the brigade for the repression of violent motorcycling action (the BRAV-M), which had collected more than 240,000 signatures on Saturday evening, Mr. Darmanin judged that it was “a politicized petition , relayed by La France insoumise 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 critics but I encourage their authors, rather than to comment on video extracts from New York or Brussels, to come to the field. »

La Nupes “takes the Republican left hostage”

Asked about the ultra-left, he assured that the intelligence services had identified “in France 2,200 S files” belonging to this movement. He denounced “a very worrying complacency of the political movements which have their entries in the National Assembly”.

“I’m sounding the alarm,” he asserts. According to him, the Nupes (New People’s Ecological and Social Union) “takes the slope of this ultra-left of the 1970s”, and “takes the Republican left hostage”.

After the launch of the procedure for the dissolution of the movement Les Uprisings of the Earth, one of the organizers of the demonstration in Sainte-Soline, Mr. Darmanin announced that he would do the same for Defco (Defense collective), a movement in Rennes ( Ille-et-Vilaine) which “calls for an uprising”. On its website, this collective says that it “aims to support people facing police and judicial repression, but also to act upstream through its action in the street and through the experience gained from repression”.