After the election on Sunday, France will increase police presence to avert unrest

In order to ensure there is no unrest following the high-stakes runoff of a parliamentary election, approximately 30,000 police will be stationed throughout France late on Sunday, according to a minister, after three candidates reported being attacked while out on the campaign trail.

The outcome of Sunday’s second round will determine whether Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally (RN) forms the next government in France, the second-largest economy in the euro zone, and gains a legislative majority for the first time.

In addition to mounting violence, political issues have dogged the campaign.

The results of the election will be disclosed on Sunday night, and Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin declared he would be “very careful” about security.

He told France 2 TV that 5,000 of the 30,000 police officers stationed that evening will be in Paris and the surrounding areas. Their mission is to “ensure that the radical right and radical left do not take advantage of the situation to cause mayhem.”

Darmanin reported that four individuals had been taken into custody in connection with the Wednesday night attack on government spokesperson Prisca Thevenot and her group while they were out hanging campaign posters.

Thevenot told the newspaper Le Parisien that although she was unharmed, a group of roughly ten young people vandalized campaign posters, injuring her deputy and a party activist.

Marie Dauchy, an RN candidate in Savoie, added that she had been assaulted on Wednesday in a market by a storekeeper.

In a related incident, on Thursday morning, the 77-year-old deputy mayor of a tiny town in southeast France, close to Grenoble, was struck in the face while hanging a sign in support of Olivier Veran, the former spokesperson for President Emmanuel Macron.

A “completely unprecedented context of violence in this campaign” was decried by Veran.

UNEXPECTED

In the meantime, a poll released on Wednesday revealed that attempts by mainstream parties to prevent the extreme right from gaining an outright majority could be successful.

The center-right Republicans (LR) would get 30 to 50 seats in the 577-seat assembly, according to a Harris Interactive survey conducted for Challenges magazine. The anti-immigration, Euroskeptic RN and its allies would receive only 190 to 220 members. This could eliminate the chance that a portion of the LR parliamentary group would back a far-right minority government.

The “republican front” was the procedure by which over 200 candidates from all political stripes withdrew from consideration in order to make room for the candidate who would be most likely to beat the RN in their district. This is when the survey was released.

There is still a lot of uncertainty, though, including whether or not voters will support the attempts to stop the RN.