The German Foreign Ministry has commissioned the NGO Counter Extremism Project (CEP) a report on the terrorist risk of the ultra-right, and entrusted to political scientist Jean-Yves Camus, the director of the Observatory of political radicalities (Jean Jaurès Foundation), the analysis of the French situation.
What risk does the ultra-right run in France?
This risk is secondary to that of radical Islam. Since the beginning of the 1990s, the country has seen very few attacks from the ultra-right, all of them foiled or failed, while, since 2012, 263 people have been killed by radical Islamists and hundreds more were injured. The ultra-right in France has had an almost constant militant potential for the past fifteen years.
A 2005 general intelligence note estimated the number of activists and sympathizers to be between 2,500 and 3,500. In 2020, we are still around 1,000 people for the hard core, and 2,000 followers. This is much less than in Germany, where the intelligence services estimate the number of militants at 33,430, of which 13,000 are «Violence-oriented», that is to say “oriented towards violence”. In France, Laurent Nunez, the national intelligence coordinator, indicated on October 4 that only five far-right plots had been identified in France since 2017.
All dismantled …
Yes, and they had varying levels of preparation. In June 2017, near Marseille, Logan Alexandre Nisin, 21, was arrested for having planned to kill the then interior minister, Christophe Castaner, and the LFI deputy Jean-Luc Mélenchon. He had set up an organization very intelligently called “OAS”, Organization of the secret army, which was already likely to arouse some suspicion. Passed by almost all the small groups in his region, disappointed by their lack of capacity or of will to take terrorist action, he had decided to act in a very small cell.
The conspiracy of the Action of the operational forces (AFO), in 2018, is singularly different: it involved militants aged 32 to 69, who had often served in the police, the army or the gendarmerie. They were preparing for a “Civil war” against the alleged Islamization of France, and had considered poisoning halal meat in supermarkets, targeting radical Islamists released from prison, imams and women wearing the hijab chosen at random.
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