The municipal elections to be held imminently in France, and the campaign for the 2027 presidential election that will get under way properly later this year, must suddenly be seen through a very different optic.
The mid-February killing in Lyon of the far-right student activist Quentin Deranque did not shock merely France, but reverberated elsewhere in Europe.
Giorgia Meloni, the prime minister of Italy, was the most prominent foreign political figure to express horror at what happened. Not least because of the ubiquitous habit of filming everything on smartphones, there is little doubt about how Mr Deranque, a 23-year-old Catholic nationalist activist, met his death.
According to the far-right feminist group Nemesis Collective, he was acting as a member of the security personnel for groups who were demonstrating outside a conference in Lyon attended by Rima Hassan, an MEP from Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s La France Insoumise (LFI).
A gang of balaclava-clad men attacked him (after fighting with other protestors), and once he was on the ground kicked him several times in the head.
Within 48 hours he was dead from a brain injury. In terms of how a civilised nation conducts its political discourse, this outrage was bad enough; but what then emerged from the criminal investigation was in many regards worse.
Some of those interviewed as suspects have connections with LFI, including two who work as parliamentary assistants to Raphaël Arnault, an LFI MP.
Most of them appeared to have been members of La Jeune Garde, a so-called anti-fascist group that Mr Arnault founded before he won a place in parliament.
La Jeune Garde, ironically for a soi-disant anti-fascist group, came to resemble nothing more than the Hitler Youth, using violence as a first and not a last resort to get the better of its ideological enemies.
The group acquired a reputation so toxic that it was banned in June last year; but it appeared to disappear in name only.
Its tactics were visible on the streets of Lyon when Mr Deranque was kicked to death in what the French press without hesitation called a ‘lynching’.
If lynch mobs are to become a staple of French, or indeed wider European politics, then the game of democracy is up.
Responsible French politicians, led by President Emmanuel Macron, have called for calm.
Several have referred to the deep divisions between the hard left and hard right in French politics that have driven more moderate parties, such as the Parti Socialiste and Les Républicains, to near-irrelevance.
The perception seems to be that there is something deeply wrong with France, and no one from the established political class can save it.
It was perhaps ironic that, on the eve of the Lyon lynching, the former interior minister Bruno Retailleau should have announced his intention to run for the presidency next year for Les Républicains.
Mr Retailleau doubtless thought that the tough anti-immigration stance he has made his signature dish would give him a fighting chance against the Rassemblement National (RN).
Sadly for him, the way French politics is at the moment, he will have an almighty struggle. What happened in Lyon has almost certainly changed the whole nature of those politics for the foreseeable future.
First, one must consider the damage it has done to LFI. Mr Mélenchon’s denunciation of the crime and his repudiation of violence sound routine and unconvincing.
One cannot doubt that he sincerely regrets the death of Mr Deranque, but Mr Arnault is a close associate, and he himself was quite happy to be associated with La Jeune Garde until it became impolitic to do so.
Those tending to the left in France need to wake up to a few unpleasant facts about LFI: that it harbours a number of people proud to see themselves as revolutionaries, and quite happy to see revolutionary methods used in pursuit of their aims to turn the basic capitalist system of the Fifth Republic upside down.
One revolutionary method is to kill your opponents – it worked in Russia in 1917 after all, and has been copied around the world ever since.
Of course, the leaders of LFI do not subscribe to these methods; but as the Lyon police (who, at the time of writing, have no fewer than 11 people in custody over the killing of Mr Deranque) will confirm, a number of their foot-soldiers do.
For all the unpleasantness of the hard right – though their racism has been toned down since the days of Jean-Marie Le Pen – murdering their opponents does not appear to be in their playbook.
Indeed, what happened in Lyon is now likely to be turned to their advantage. Next to LFI – however much LFI’s leaders may seek to distance themselves from the mob in Lyon – the RN look remarkably reasonable.
Their movement now has a martyr in Mr Deranque, murdered (as they would put it) by Marxist thugs simply because he sought to defend the freedom of expression of a group of anti-Marxist French women.
There is an inevitability about the future exploitation of this tragedy up until the presidential election, and doubtless beyond.
If that isn’t bad enough for Mr Retailleau, and on the moderate left the former president François Hollande, who is floating the idea of standing again himself, another conspicuous martyrdom on the hard right may be in the offing.
Although we shall not know for sure until the summer, it will be a brave man or woman who bets the house on Marine Le Pen having her ban on running for public office overturned in time to become a presidential candidate next year.
Her dauphin, Jordan Bardella, will instead be able to point to the leftist state’s conspiracy against her, and against democracy, as he runs in her stead.
One would be inclined to say that this campaign is going to turn nasty, were it not for the fact that it is nasty already.
Editor’s note: Nearly 3,200 people marched peacefully on Saturday, February 21, to protest what organisers called a ‘far-left lynching’, a week after Quentin Deranque’s death.
The Rhône prefecture said it has launched legal action over Nazi salutes and racist and homophobic insults during the march.
