Sainte-Solin: LFI wants a parliamentary commission of inquiry to keep order

Two days after a demonstration against the megapools turned into a bitter battle between police and activists, maintaining order is today at the center of the invective between the left and the government.

LFI MP Clemence Guette announced on RTL this morning her group’s desire to request a “parliamentary commission of inquiry into decisions made in terms of maintaining order in Sainte-Solin.” Extremely violent clashes confronted anti-pool activists this Saturday against 3,200 gendarmes and police in this city of Deux Sèvres.

The security forces entrenched at the foot of this “mega pool” reacted quickly, erecting multiple tear gas walls in succession, launching some 4,000 grenades to break out of the encirclement, and using water cannons while setting four of their vehicles on fire. The prefecture of Deux-Sèvres estimated that more than a thousand people were the most dangerous elements, some of them equipped with makeshift shields, sticks or snowshoes, so several hundred of them targeted the reserve.

The deputy for Val-de-Marne deplored “the wounded by the demonstrators because they were only there to demonstrate” and “the wounded by the police because they simply obeyed an absurd order (…) to defend a huge hole. The elected official also deplored the way policing had been organized: “In kilometers of demonstrations, we met no one, and then we arrived at the mega-pool with 3,000 policemen who protected (it) and kept order. do it at any cost.”

Veran criticizes ‘irresponsible’ presence of elected officials

The two seriously wounded gendarmes are “currently in a relatively emergency condition,” prosecutors said on Sunday evening. In total, emergency services treated 47 soldiers and seven demonstrators. One of the injured protesters is still between life and death.

The organizers – the agricultural union Confédération paysanne, the collective associations Bassines non merci and the environmental movement “Earth Revolt” – report much greater losses: 200 demonstrators were injured, including 40 seriously. The charge applies only to officially rescued wounded, which may explain the discrepancy between the figures.

Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the leader of Insoumis, reacted very quickly on Twitter, denouncing the “police violence” and reasoning that without Brave-M, without this circus, nothing would have happened other than a walk through the fields.

“Jean-Luc Mélenchon and his friends are a rentier of anger, a rentier of the suffering of little people, and they are complicit in these forms of violence,” Olivier Veran criticized on Monday.

“These are people who have boarded trains and planes from all over Europe to fight this,” he said into a BFM/RMC microphone. A government spokesman deplored the presence of elected officials, including Clemence Goethe. “It’s irresponsible when you have a demonstration banned because, as they say, there will be aggressive people who won’t come for environmental reasons,” he criticized.