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As police continue to pursue the gunmen who killed two prison guards at a tollbooth in Normandy and freed a convicted drug gang-related killing, the debate over law and order in France has intensified ahead of next month’s European elections.
Both Gérald Darmanin, the hardline interior minister, and Jordan Bardellafar-right National Assembly president Marine Le Pen used the same dramatic vocabulary to warn of “wildness” in French society.
The murders of prison officers have shed light on two major problems in the France.
First, the growing drug trade and related organized criminal activities, from arms dealing to murder and extortion. The escaped prisoner, Mohamed Amra, 30, from northern France, was recently convicted of aggravated robbery and charged in a case of kidnapping resulting in death. He is suspected of involvement in drug trafficking and ordering gangster murders.
Curse senate report published on the same day as the attack, it said the government had failed to stop France’s increasingly violent drug trade, which is estimated to be worth between €3bn (£2.6bn) and €6bn a year, with around 240,000 people earn their living from it directly or indirectly.
The second problem is the long-standing crisis in the French prison service. Ann annual report by a prison watchdog on Wednesday found that overcrowding in French prisons is so great – with 77,450 prisoners held despite only 61,470 places – that thousands are sleeping on mattresses on the floor. Prisoners often have less than 3 square meters (32 square feet) of personal space.
Opposition politicians said the inmates appear to be able to continue their criminal activities from prison, which are increasingly violent. Jerome Düren, a Socialist senator who headed the Senate’s drug-trafficking committee, said the van ambush at the Normandy prison confirmed “some of the concerns in our report: that the risk of premeditated escape linked to criminal organizations is very real because the enormous financial capacity of these organizations”.
As angry prison officials on Wednesday began blocking the entrances to French prisons to protest the latest violence, right-wing and far-right politicians rushed to visit.
Bruno Retailo, a senator from the right-wing Les Républicains party, likened France to the worst countries in the world in terms of endemic gang violence. “We are on the road to Mexicanization,” he said. “Prisons are full. The dealers operate their drug trafficking business from prison.
Out of a Prison, Marion Mareschal, Campaign for European elections of the far-right, anti-immigration Reconquest party, led by former TV pundit Eric Zemmur, said it felt like “being in a third-world country.” Zemmour said Amra and his accomplices should be stripped of their French citizenship.
The issue of law and order in France is not itself a central theme in European election manifestos, but many politicians are seizing on it to prepare the ground for the 2027 presidential race.
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This is the far-right anti-immigration National Unity party voting at an unprecedented peak of around 32% in the European elections, with French President Emmanuel Macron’s centrist list trailing well behind at around 17%.
Bardella has repeatedly argued that immigration is linked to insecurity and crime in France. He said his party was preparing the post-Macron era, presenting itself as the main alternative for the presidency in 2027, when the incumbent cannot run again.
Macron’s response was to push young Prime Minister Gabriel Attal forward as the voice of an increasingly hard line on “authority”, security, crime and youth violence. Atal will debate Bardella on television next week and questions are now expected about the brutal prison van ambush.
But other parties have warned that Macron’s strategy of creating a direct opposition between centrists and the far right is dangerous and serves to legitimize Le Pen.
Leftist Raphael Glucksmann, running for the Socialists and Place Publique, is catching up with Macron’s centrists in European elections. It is followed by the right-wing Les Républicains, the left-wing La France Insoumise, the Greens and Reconquest.
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