A populist political activist has reported being assaulted in Paris on Friday, in the latest example of right-wing political figures facing violence in Europe.
The president of the youth movement of Éric Zemmour’s Reconquête! (Reconquest) anti-mass migration party, Stanislas Rigault, 24, said that he filed a police report after he was attacked by a group of six or seven people while waiting for a taxi in the 14th arrondissement of the French capital on Friday evening.
According to a police source cited by Le Figaro, the Génération Zemmour was descended upon by the apparent group of leftists after they recognised him as a right-wing activist and began shouting “fascist” and “Nazi” at the young man.
Media pundit and “Reconquete” party presidential candidate Eric Zemmour (2nd L), next to Reconquete! vice-president Guillaume Peltier (L) President of “Generation Z” movement Stanislas Rigault (C), French far-right politician Marion Marechal (2nd R) and political ally Philippe de Villiers (R) sing the national anthem at the end of his meeting at the Palais des Sports in Paris, on April 7, 2022, as part of the political campaign, a few days before the first round of France’s presidential election. (Photo by BERTRAND GUAY/AFP via Getty Images)
Speaking to the newspaper of record, Rigault said: “They started to push me, to tell us that we had nothing to do there.”
A female member of the group began to push him, he said, adding: “I push her away and at that moment, she spits on me.”
At the time of this reporting, the perpetrators have yet to be identified by police.
It is not the first time the populist party has faced political violence, with Reconquête! leader and former presidential candidate Éric Zemmour was injured in 2021 during a campaign rally which saw 39 Atifa radicals arrested, some of whom were armed with Molotov cocktails and “bottles of acid”.
Zemmour is not alone in facing attacks from Antifa, with a Dutch branch of the radical leftist group claiming responsibility for an assault on Forum for Democracy (FvD) leader Thierry Baudet, who had a beer glass smashed into the side of his head by a teenage member of the group during a campaign stop in December.
Last summer in Germany, Andreas Jurca, the head of the populist Alternative for Germany (AfD) in the Bavarian district of Augsburg, said that a group of migrants brutally attacked him as he was on his way to a campaign event.
Just days later, an AfD member of the German Bundestag parliament, Beatrix von Storch was attacked in Daun by a man carrying dog faeces.
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