France’s ‘New Popular Front’ Faces Extremism Woes

State of the Union: Left-wing candidates have been caught advocating terrorism and issuing death threats.

The post France’s ‘New Popular Front’ Faces Extremism Woes appeared first on The American Conservative.

In France’s upcoming parliamentary elections, the first round of which are on June 30, one of the three major blocks, the far-left “New Popular Front,” has had trouble with several of their candidates.

In the sixth constituency of the Seine-and-Marne department, Amal Bentounsi, the candidate of the La France Insoumise party (LFI), a New Popular Front member party, has been revealed to have a lengthy police file for 11 crimes related to her activities as a far-left, anti-police activist. Bentounsi became involved in anti-police activities after her brother, a repeat offender, was killed attempting to flee from the police in 2012. 

Ismaël Boudjekada, an independent who lists himself as a “candidate supporting the New Popular Front” for a constituency of French living abroad, was sentenced on Thursday, June 20, for apologia for terrorism. He was fined €20,000 for the sentence and prohibited from standing for election after having described Hamas as a resistance movement.

In the Vaucluse department, another LFI candidate, Raphaël Arnault, has been revealed to be a member of an Antifa organization and to have issued death threats against two women attending a public memorial for Dominique Bernard, a teacher killed in mass-stabbing at a school perpetrated by an immigrant who had pledged allegiance to ISIS.

Yet another LFI candidate, the Franco-Gambian Aly Diouara, who is running in Seine-Saint-Denis, has been accused of being “obsessed with Jews and Whites,” after numerous of the candidates’ social media posts were uncovered to use inflammatory language about both groups.

Currently, the conservative-populist Rassemblement National (RN) party of Marine Le Pen and Jordan Bardella are set to win a plurality of seats in the National Assembly. It is unclear how coalition-building after the election would develop, and if the result would create an RN-led government.

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