France promises sanctions for the military who warned of the "collapse" of the country

French President Emmanuel Macron and Chief of the General Staff General François Lecointre at the parade on July 14, 2020.POOL / Reuters

There will be sanctions and they will be "exemplary", the French Army promised on Thursday about the military who published last week a platform in a far-right magazine warning of the "collapse" of France and the possibility of an "intervention" of the armed forces if policy makers do nothing to prevent it. Political outrage over both the article and its electoral manipulation by far-right leader Marine Le Pen, who invited the signatories to join her ranks, has grown in recent days, until receiving a "firm" condemnation. the Prime Minister, Jean Castex, after an initial silence from the government, highly criticized by the left.

Despite this, the platform added this Thursday more than 15,000 signatures compared to the original thousand, according to the author of the "open letter" to the French Government, the former gendarmerie officer and then the

yellow vest

Jean-Pierre Fabre-Bernadac, who nevertheless it does not reveal the identity of the new signatories.

A survey by the Harris Interactive institute for the LCI network reveals that 58% of those surveyed (1,613 people) support the signatories.

Moreover, a high percentage say they share opinions from the tribune, such as that the laws of the country do not apply throughout the territory (86%).

And almost half, 49%, declare in this context favorable to the intervention of the Army, "to guarantee order and security in France", even if they do so without an order.

"This is called a coup," says Jean-Yves Camus, director of the Observatory of political radicalities at the Jean Jaurès Foundation, who nevertheless says "very doubtful" about the results of a survey carried out in the midst of a debate on a platform of which many have heard of (64%), but that few admit to know exactly what it is (38%).

And in a heated environment, especially after the attack on Friday at a Rambouillet police station.

"I'm not sure that if this survey were done in two or three weeks, we would get the same percentage," he says by phone.

"I would like to know if they would react in the same way if one day they woke up and saw tanks in the street."

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Beyond the polls, the Government has demanded responsibility before an initiative "contrary to all our republican principles, to the honor, to the duty of the Army", as Castex said on Wednesday.

As

the Chief of the Army General Staff, François Lecointre,

advanced in

Le Parisien

, the generals who signed the rostrum and who are in what in France is called "second section" - close to retirement, but who could still be called for a mission - they will be forced to withdraw.

"I wish that his forced retirement be ordered," said Lecointre. "It is an exceptional procedure that we are going to launch immediately at the request of Defense Minister [Florence Parly]." All will have to appear before a military superior council. At the end of the process, he indicated, "it is the President of the Republic who signs the withdrawal decree." According to Defense spokesman Hervé Grandjean, the generals could also lose "the right to wear the uniform, their military card and, also, the right to sign documents adding their gradation." What is sought, he stressed, is that they be "exemplary" sanctions.

Lecointre indicated that so far, in addition to the generals in reserve, 18 active military personnel have been identified among the original signatories, including four officers, who will also have to face a disciplinary process yet to be determined. "My intention is that (the sanctions) are stronger for the higher ranking military (...) the higher the responsibilities, the greater the obligation to be exemplary," he said.

On April 21, a "twenty generals, a hundred high command and more than a thousand other military personnel", according to

Valeurs Actuelles

, denounced what they consider a "collapse" of France. They attributed it to "a certain anti-racism that seeks a single objective: to create unrest, a hatred between the communities" and an "Islamism and hordes of the peripheral neighborhoods" that try to transform parts of France "into territories submissive to dogmas contrary to our own. Constitution".

"Those who run our country must find, imperatively, the necessary courage to eradicate these dangers," claimed the military, who urged French President Emmanuel Macron to "waste no more time" and warned that if they did not It acts in the face of "laxism", it could produce "the intervention of our active comrades".

The trend to the right or to the extreme right in the French armed forces - and the police - is no secret.

In 2017, 41% of the military and 54% of the police officers surveyed by the Cevipof institute said they had voted for Le Pen in the first round of the presidential elections, compared to 16% of the entire population.

In March, the newspaper

Mediapart

identified at least fifty active military personnel with neo-Nazi affiliation, who, according to Lecointre, were finally thirty who have already been sanctioned.

In spite of everything, the military officials assure that problems such as the rostrum are punctual - it is signed by 18 active soldiers out of a total of 210,000 - and that the majority, regardless of their ideology, respect the neutrality imposed on them by the uniform.

"The only flag we carry is the French tricolor," stressed Lecointre, who also categorically rejects any coup temptation among the French armed forces.

“The specter of a

putsch

[coup] seems out of place to me.

There is not the slightest temptation of that type, ”he asserted.

Nor is Camus uneasy.

"Honestly, I don't believe in the hypothesis of seeing tanks on the streets of Paris."

Electoral use of the rostrum

For most of her rivals and political analysts, the electoralist use made by far-right leader Marine Le Pen of the military rostrum on the "collapse" of France, which she invited to join her project, has been a error.

Or a way of seeing the wolf under the lamb's skin.

"How can people, and Mrs. Le Pen in particular, who aspires to exercise the responsibilities of the State, can endorse an initiative that does not exclude acting against the State?" Asked the Prime Minister, Jean Castex, for whom this shows that Le Pen, despite his attempts to "de-demonize" his party, the National Regrouping, continues to hide his extremist nature. "Genius and figure to the grave," he decreed.  

Le Pen says to assume her gesture. And for now, it doesn't seem to suffer consequences. One year after the presidential elections, the far-right leader remains, insistently, at the top of the polls and with the best chances of the entire French political spectrum of going to the second round together with the current president, Emmanuel Macron, as in 2017. 

One of the latest polls, published by Le Monde this weekend, confirms that Le Pen would obtain the highest percentage of votes (between 26 and 28%) in the first round regardless of the conservative candidate and with the divided left. He would thus reach the second round with Macron, who would obtain in the first ballot between 25 and 29% of the vote. “In all the planned scenarios, the 2017 finalists are widely in the lead in the first round. The current distressing situation allows the president to accumulate a base of voters unwilling to change everything, while Marine Le Pen captures the anger, ”the newspaper said.