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France’s ‘New Popular Front’ Faces Extremism Woes

State of the Union: Left-wing candidates have been caught advocating terrorism and issuing death threats.
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Credit: SAMEER AL-DOUMY/AFP via Getty Images

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.

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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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