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A man slapped Emmanuel Macron on Tuesday, briefly interrupting a walk during the French president’s tour of the provinces ahead of this month’s regional elections.
Two 28-year-old men were questioned by the gendarmerie after the audible blow, accompanied by a shout of the royalist slogan “Montjoie Saint-Denis!” and “Down with Macronism!” – It was delivered by a man among a group of onlookers in the southern city of Tain-l’Hermitage.
Macron’s Elysee Palace said a man had “attempted to beat” the president and that talks and handshakes with the crowd resumed immediately after the incident and the visit continued.
Opposition parties have strongly criticized Macron’s “Tour de France” ahead of regional elections on June 20 and 27, arguing that it used its presidential status to promote its La République en Marche party without being subject to limits. campaign funding.
His supporters have argued that he only wants to “take the pulse” of the French people to find out what he can achieve in the last year of his presidential term, which was marked first by the anti-government yellow vests 2018 protests and then the Covid-19 pandemic.
But Marine Le Pen, leader of the far-right Rassemblement National party and the politician who was expected to be his main rival in next year’s presidential election, asked: “There is only one person in France who has not understood that Emmanuel Macron is taking advantage of his position as president to campaign for the regional elections? ”
On Tuesday, however, politicians from across the spectrum rallied to condemn the act of violence against Macron.
Le Pen said “the behavior was unacceptable and would be thoroughly condemned in a democracy,” while far-left Jean-Luc Mélenchon of La France Insoumise (France Unbowed), usually a fierce critic of Macron, said that he was in solidarity with the president.
Shortly before the incident, Macron called for political calm. He was reacting to Mélenchon’s prediction that there would be a “murder or serious incident” in the last week of next year’s presidential election campaign to demonize Muslims, and to the subsequent publication by a right-winger of a video that showed the simulated murder of a Mélenchon supporter.
“Opposition parties can express themselves freely in democracy,” Macron said Tuesday, “but the other side is the end of violence and hatred…. The French need something else, they are tired of the crisis and the bad news ”.
While Macron is sometimes accused by his detractors of being arrogant and out of touch, he enjoys walks and discussions or conversations with spectators when he travels the country. He is famous among his critics for telling a gardener who visited the Elysee on a cultural open day that he complained about the lack of work that could find him a job in a restaurant or hotel only crossing the road.
Macron is not the first French president to be subjected to violence in a public place. Nicolas Sarkozy was sometimes mistreated and once mistreated. And during the July 2002 national day parade, a far-right activist tried to shoot Jacques Chirac with a .22 rifle, but failed and was later jailed.
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