In Germany there is a firewall against the right, RN boss Jordan Bardella is now calling for one against the left in France.Image: keystone
After the murder of a young nationalist, right-wing extremists took to the streets in Lyon. Left leader Mélenchon has reason to worry before the municipal elections.
02/23/2026, 04:3402/23/2026, 04:34
Over 3,000 right-wing extremists and right-wing extremists, mostly young, marched through the streets of Lyon on Saturday, not far from the place where ten days ago ultra-left anti-fascists killed a right-wing extremist student with brutal kicks to the head. 500 police officers – and perhaps also a call from President Emmanuel Macron – ensured that everything went smoothly. The family of the slain arch-nationalist and Catholic stayed away from the rally, as did the right-wing National Rally (RN).
Around 3,000 people, some of them right-wing extremists, demonstrated in Lyon for the man who was killed.Image: keystone
RN founder Marine Le Pen kept her distance so as not to be lumped in with right-wing extremists and neo-Nazis – some of whom had traveled from abroad – ahead of the municipal elections in March. There were indeed some Nazi salutes at the rally. A gun carrier was arrested.
At the front of the demonstration were representatives of the right-wing feminist group Némésis, which Quentin Deranque had been deployed to protect a week and a half ago. The police have now arrested seven suspects, including several members of the ultra-left Antifa militia Jeune Garde (Young Guard). Two of those arrested so far were parliamentary assistants to MP Raphaël Arnaud, who founded the openly violent Young Guard.
Arnaud belongs to the left-wing populist party La France Insoumise (LFI). However, its leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon denies any political involvement and refuses to ask Arnaud to resign; Only his assistants involved in the crime were suspended.
Jean-Luc Mélenchon is under pressure after recent incidents.Image: keystone
“Reversal of values”
But the pressure on presidential candidate Mélenchon is growing. His party, which is now associated with violence and death, faces a fiasco in the March local elections. While Marine Le Pen advances her course of political respectability and purges her electoral lists of racist or anti-Semitic local candidates, there are no such efforts among the “Indomitables” of the LFI. In Lyon, for example, the deadly clash between left-wing and right-wing extremists took place on the sidelines of a meeting of the controversial pro-Palestinian LFI candidate Rima Hassan.
Rima Hassan has been accused in the past of justifying the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack on Israel.Image: keystone
The sociologist Erwan Lecoeur explained at the weekend that Lyon’s death led to an “actual reversal of values”: it was no longer the right that was considered anti-republican, but Mélenchon’s party. RN leader Jordan Bardella is therefore calling for a “firewall” against LFI in the coming municipal elections. Such a republican front had previously worked against the right; In the last parliamentary elections in 2024, it probably prevented Marine Le Pen’s RN party from winning.
Whether it should also apply to left-wing extremists is controversial on the moderate left. Former President François Hollande said that electoral agreements between the Socialists and the LFI were no longer possible after the death. The socialist MP Jérôme Guedj would still like to see electoral agreements between all left and center parties in order to prevent the Lepenists from winning elections, especially in the big cities. (aargauerzeitung.ch)