No municipal campaign debate goes by without mention of the death of far-right activist Quentin Deranque, who was beaten to death by antifascist activists on February 14 in Lyon. The debate held in Lyon itself on February 24 saw heated exchanges between the four participants.

The same dynamic played out in Marseille during the first – and perhaps only – televised debate bringing together the four main candidates for mayor on Thursday, February 19. “The half-hour on Quentin wasn’t even on the agenda… We wanted to talk about Marseille, but they took us for fools,” said the left-wing incumbent mayor, Benoît Payan, after the broadcast. Radical-left candidate Sébastien Delogu, whose party La France Insoumise (LFI) has ties with a group accused of taking part in the beating, tried to defuse the controversy from the outset by paying his respects to Deranque, while also recalling that, in 1995 in Marseille, a young man named Ibrahim Ali was killed by activists putting up posters for the far-right Front National (former iteration of the RN).

But it has been especially on the ground, in the thick of the campaign for the municipal elections on March 15 and 22, that the repercussions of Deranque’s death have been immediately felt. In the southern city of Montpellier, the campaign office of LFI’s mayoral candidate Nathalie Oziol was vandalized on the very day of Deranque’s death, the day before a rally in her support by LFI leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon. Offices were also damaged in Belfort (northeast), Saint-Nazaire (west) and Lille (north, all cities where the climate has been tense since the start of the year.

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