Paris attack injects greater uncertainty into French vote

France votes today: The attack has provided a potent opportunity for conservatives

It has almost become routine in France: A terrorist attack shatters the rhythms of daily life, bringing bloodshed and anguish. The assailant turns out to be someone known to the authorities.

What is different now is the timing, as Paris is again on high alert, right before the country goes to the polls on Sunday in one of the most tumultuous and unpredictable presidential races in memory.

The brazen assault on Thursday by Karim Cheurfi, 39, a French national with a history of violence, left one police officer dead on the sidewalk of the Champs-Élysées.

It has also provided a potent opportunity for conservatives, primarily Marine Le Pen, leader of the far right National Front, to use the violence to try to stoke hostility toward immigrants and Muslims, as well as fears about whether citizens can be protected from terrorism.

Barely a week ago, with her poll numbers sagging, Le Pen tried to rally her base with a raw appeal against Muslims and immigrants. It was unclear if her gambit was resonating. Now she and other candidates are jockeying to position themselves as tough on terror, amid revelations that Cheurfi, like several attackers before him, had been on the authorities’ radar.

The Paris prosecutor’s office on Friday acknowledged having opened a preliminary terrorism investigation into Cheurfi as recently as March 9. He was arrested in February, only to be released for lack of evidence. After Thursday’s attack, the police found kitchen knives, a gun and a Quran in the trunk of the car he was driving, and also pieces of paper with scribbled allegiances to the Islamic State, which claimed responsibility for the attack.

Le Pen pounced, mocking the departing president, François Hollande, and vowing to be an unblinkingly tough leader. “For 10 years, under the governments of left and right, everything has been done to make us losers,” she said, speaking from her party headquarters outside Paris on Friday. “There must be a president who acts and who protects.”

But Le Pen was not the only one who stood to gain. Some analysts predicted that the principal electoral beneficiary could be the embattled mainstream centre-right candidate François Fillon, who produced a book last fall called Defeating Islamic Totalitarianism, and who also uses harsh rhetoric to depict the antiterrorism fight as a war of civilisations.

Fillon, a former prime minister, and once the presidential front-runner, had languished in polls after becoming entangled in a nepotism scandal that led to embezzlement charges against him. But he has been gaining ground in recent weeks, and the attack might provide a final push.

Throughout Friday, the authorities in Paris continued their investigation as more details became known about  Cheurfi, who was killed by the police on Thursday. He had been convicted of crimes four times and spent more than 10 years in prison, most of that time for shooting at police officers during a 2001 robbery.

A man identified by BFM-TV as Cheurfi’s lawyer described him as “extremely isolated, a solitary person,” who spent much of his time playing video games. “His development had been blocked,” said the lawyer, Jean-Laurent Panier. “His father and brother were worried about him.”

Cheurfi was not among France’s notorious “S-Files,” the thousands suspected of extremism whom the state is officially surveilling, but does not have enough formal proof to arrest. The S-Files have acquired near-mythic boogeyman status in the French imagination. On Friday, Le Pen called for their expulsion from the country. At a campaign rally in Marseille earlier in the week, she called them an “immense army of the shadows that wants us to live in terror.”

Emboldened after the Champs-Élysées attack, Le Pen sought, as she often does, to place the antiterrorism fight as a struggle for the French soul. The idea is at the heart of her nationalistic campaign, and even as her momentum has slowed she has still placed first in many polls before the Sunday vote. “France is targeted not for what it does, but for what it is, and the French, for the simple reason that they are French,” Le Pen said.

The French government immediately reacted harshly to Le Pen’s demands — a measure of how seriously it took the potential boost of Thursday night’s shooting to a party it views as a threat to French democracy. Le Pen “was seeking, like after every tragedy, to take advantage of it, in order to sow division,” said the prime minister, Bernard Cazeneuve. “She’s seeking to shamelessly exploit fear and emotion for exclusively political ends.”

In the neighbourhood where the attack occurred — a hybrid mix of the raffish and refined, visited by thousands of tourists daily — Le Pen’s proposals struck a chord. “She’s just gained one point in the polls. At least,” said Christophe Pohls, a barman at a café on the Rue de Ponthieu, who approved of Le Pen’s idea of expelling those named the S-Files.

The attack occurred on Thursday night, and on Friday morning people in the neighbourhood were still recovering. “Hallucinatory. First, three shots, then four. We were in the middle of cooking, and we had to stop,” said Jean-François Desloovere, a cook at La Casita on the Rue Washington, just around the corner. “The minute you saw people running, you knew what was up.” He recalled looking down the normally packed Champs-Élysées “and it was totally empty,” with pedestrians pressing themselves against storefronts, “like flies stuck against the glass.”

Meanwhile, French overseas territories and residents in some US states began voting on Saturday, a day ahead of a main first-round vote that could change the global political landscape. They vote early so as not to be influenced by the mainland results due on Sunday evening at around 16 pm.

©2017 The New York Times News Service