The political class condemned this Monday the attack against a deputy of the government majority at his home in the French territory of Saint Pierre and Miquelon, off the coast of Canada, by protesters against the health passport.
On Sunday, deputy Stéphane Claireaux, from the centrist Republic on the Move (LREM) party of President Emmanuel Macron, was thrown seaweed and stones at his home, an attack that he will denounce and that, in his words, “resembled stoning.”
“We have seen the intensification of violence” against elected politicians, lamented the French head of state who, during a visit to Nice (southeast) focused on security issues, lamented the “intolerable” and “unacceptable” attack on Claireaux.
Although Macron’s political rivals, who have not yet confirmed his candidacy for the April presidential election, condemned the attack, they also denounced the tension created by the French president last week with controversial statements.
“To the unvaccinated, I really want to annoy them. And that is what we will continue to do, until the end,” the head of state acknowledged in the newspaper Le Parisien on Tuesday, when his government seeks the implementation of a controversial passport vaccination.
Republican deputy (right) Éric Ciotti asked on RMC radio for “sanctions against those who use violence in a somewhat crazy way, with delusional arguments,” but also criticized Macron’s “provocations” seeking “conflict.” for electoral reasons.
“The President of the Republic acted in his speech last week as an arsonist, because he attacked unvaccinated people, instead of trying to convince them,” the Republican presidential candidate Valérie Pécresse said in France Info.
The head of the Socialist Party, Olivier Faure, criticized that “some anti-vaccines use the president’s provocations to justify their violence.” The attack is “absolutely unacceptable,” tweeted his ecologist counterpart Julien Bayou.
The French Minister for Relations with Parliament, Marc Fesneau, for his part, on the Public Sénat chain, pointed out the public officials who leave elected politicians at the mercy of “popular revenge” and described “physical pressure” as “totalitarianism” .
The head of LREM in the lower house, Christophe Castaner, condemned the “cowardice [de los manifestantes] before a lonely, peaceful, defenseless man, who stood up, who came out, who wanted to speak “and recalled that in 2021 322 deputies were threatened, most of their group.
Macron’s statements and the record rebound in covid-19 cases in the middle of the fifth wave marked by the omicron variant returned the health situation to the front line of the electoral campaign for the presidential election in April.
For observers, with this controversy, the liberal leader, who leads the voting intention polls followed by the right and far right candidates, tried to rally behind him the supporters of vaccination and impose the issue of covid-19 in the Bell.
