As police continued to hunt the gunmen who killed two prison guards at a Normandy toll booth and freed a convict linked to gangland drug killings, the debate on law and order in France has intensified before next month’s European elections.
Both Gérald Darmanin, the hardline interior minister, and Jordan Bardella, the far-right president of Marine Le Pen’s National Rally, used the same dramatic vocabulary to warn of “savagery” in French society.
The prison officer killings have shone a spotlight on two major problems in France.
First, the growing drug trade and its associated organised criminal activities, from arms-dealing to murder and extortion. The escaped prisoner, Mohamed Amra, 30, from northern France, had recently been convicted of aggravated robbery and charged in a case of abduction leading to death. He is suspected of involvement in drug trafficking and ordering gangland killings.
A damning senate report published on the same day as the attack said the government had been unable to stem the increasingly violent French drug trade, which is estimated to be worth between €3bn (£2.6bn) and €6bn a year, with about 240,000 people making a living from it directly or indirectly.
The second problem is the long-running crisis in the French prison service. An annual report by a prisons watchdog on Wednesday found overcrowding in French prisons was so great – with 77,450 prisoners being held despite only 61,470 places – that thousands slept on mattresses on the floor. Often prisoners had less than 3 sq metres (32 sq ft) of personal space.
Opposition politicians said prisoners appeared able to continue their criminal activities from inside prisons, which were increasingly violent. Jérôme Durain, a Socialist senator who co-headed the senate commission on drug trafficking, said the Normandy prison van ambush confirmed “some of the worries in our report: that the risk of pre-meditated escape linked to criminal organisations was very real because of those organisations’ huge financial capacity”.
As angry prison officers on Wednesday began to blockade the entrances to jails across France in protest at the latest violence, politicians from the right and far right rushed to visit them.
Bruno Retailleau, a senator from the right’s Les Républicains, likened France to the world’s worst countries for endemic gang violence. “We’re on a path to Mexicanisation,” he said. “Prisons are sieves. Dealers run their drug-trafficking businesses from jail.”
Outside one prison, Marion Maréchal, campaigning for the European elections for the far-right, anti-immigration Reconquest party headed by the former TV pundit Éric Zemmour, said it felt like “being in a third world country”. Zemmour said Amra and his accomplices should be stripped of their French nationality.
The issue of law and order in France is not itself a central topic in European election manifestos, but many politicians are seizing on it to prepare the ground for the presidential race of 2027.
The far-right anti-immigration National Rally party is polling at an unprecedented high of about 32% in the European elections, with the centrist list of the French president, Emmanuel Macron, lagging significantly behind on about 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 has been to push forward the young prime minister, Gabriel Attal, as the voice of an increasingly hardline on “authority”, security, crime and youth violence. Attal will debate with Bardella on TV next week, and questions are now expected on the violent prison van ambush.
But other parties warned that Macron’s strategy of setting up a direct opposition of centrists v the far right is dangerous and serves to legitimise Le Pen.
The left’s Raphaël Glucksmann, running for the Socialists and Place Publique, is catching up with Macron’s centrists in European election polls. He is followed by the right’s Les Républicains, the left’s La France Insoumise, the Greens and Reconquest.
