The latest attack in France fuels the political fight. There has been no truce after a Tunisian Islamist killed a French police officer with a knife on Friday at the police station in the municipality of Rambouillet, 50 kilometers from Paris. Three people around the assailant, who died from the gunshots of the officers after the attack, are being held for questioning. Investigators have registered the home of one of the detainees and that of the father of the aggressor, identified as Jamel Gorchene and a 36-year-old delivery man who arrived in France in 2009. Last December he obtained a residence permit. The French president visited the victim's husband on Saturday, an administrative police officer identified as Stéphanie M., 49, and mother of two children, 13 and 18 years old.The prime minister, Jean Castex, called a crisis meeting in the Matignon palace, the seat of the government headquarters.
Criticism of the president of the republic, Emmanuel Macron, came when the first details of the attack were still being known. Security, terrorism, Islamism and immigration are a key terrain in which the duel of the presidential elections of 2022 between Macron and his far-right rival, Marine Le Pen will be disputed.
“The same horrors happen, the same infinite sadness when thinking about the relatives and colleagues of this murdered police, the same profiles guilty of this barbarism, the same Islamist motives.
We can't take it anymore, ”Le Pen wrote on Twitter.
The deputy of Los Republicanos (traditional right) Éric Ciotti, through a statement, added that "the Government has seriously sinned of naivety and inaction in the face of terrorism."
For its part, the conservative newspaper
Le Figaro
stated in its editorial that "the signs of hatred are not weak, they are manifest, but France is still in a flagrant crime of denial of reality."
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Macron does not want to give up the banner of security and the fight against jihadism to the extreme right, because he believes that, if it shows signs of weakness, it is fertile ground for the extremists.
And in recent months, he has multiplied initiatives to enhance his law and order credentials and win over traditional right-wing voters.
The president placed a conservative, Gérald Darmanin, at the head of the Interior Ministry in the summer and has promoted controversial laws on security and against Islamist separatism.
It has also strengthened border control with Spain and Italy.
And it has increased the strength of the police, who often feel unfairly targeted by cases of violence by the security forces, at the same time that they are the target of threats and attacks like the one on Friday.
Recent attacks
Friday's is not the first of its kind in France in recent months.
On September 25, 2020, a Pakistani who had been in France for two years injured two people in Paris.
On October 16, an 18-year-old Chechen man who had lived in this country since he was a child beheaded Samuel Paty, a high school teacher in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine, near the capital.
And on the 29th of the same month, a Tunisian who had just entered Europe after crossing the Mediterranean cut their throats and stabbed to death three people in a church in Nice.
Le Pen sees in these attacks, perpetrated with a knife by more or less lonely jihadists of foreign origin, an opportunity to make his case before Macron.
