Next Sunday, the French will be called upon to decide between the two presidential finalists: Emmanuel Macron, the outgoing president, and Marine Le Pen, the far-right candidate. All week, RFI deciphers the programs of the two candidates: what do they propose on police and justice issues, while security is one of the priorities of the French?
Unsurprisingly, it is Marine Le Pen who devotes the most space to security in her program (18 pages, against a handful for her opponent). The far-right candidate first paints a very black picture of a France where “ whole sections of the territory [échapperaient] to state authority “, and or ” drug or arms trafficking [auraient] taken on unprecedented proportions “.
To respond to this, it proposes a massive increase in the budgets for security and justice, of the order of 1.5 billion euros per year, to create 7,000 police and gendarme posts and 3,000 administrative staff posts. supposed to relieve the forces of order of the ” paperwork “. It also intends to oblige all municipalities with more than 10,000 inhabitants to have a municipal police.
After five years at the Élysée, Emmanuel Macron is working first to defend his record, evoking the creation of 10,000 police and gendarme posts, the launch of the daily security police and an increase of 3 5 billion euros from the budget of the Ministry of the Interior.
The president-candidate also intends to entrust administrative personnel with the guarding of public buildings and the policing of hearings, for example, in order to be able to redeploy 3,500 police and gendarmes on the ground.
Le Pen wants a “presumption of self-defense”
After a five-year term marked by the movement of yellow vests and the highlighting of police violence, by several cases of racism tainting the work of the police, these questions do not appear in either program. Emmanuel Macron all the same mentions the generalization of the wearing of body cameras for “ calmer police-population relations “. Marine Le Pen proposes on the contrary to establish a presumption of self-defense for police and gendarmes “, who would then no longer have to provide proof of the legality of their shooting.
On justice, the two programs are opposed more frontally. While last winter, 3,000 magistrates and a hundred court clerks published a Tribune denouncing ” a justice that does not listen and that times everything “, the two candidates certainly agree on the need to significantly increase the workforce. Marine Le Pen wants double the number of magistrates to bring it to 20,000 (mostly chosen out of competition), when Emmanuel Macron plans to recruit 8,500 magistrates and justice staff by 2027.
Fixed fines versus minimum penalties
But when the president-candidate intends to generalize fixed fines payable immediately for offenses punishable by prison terms of less than one year (this is already the case for the use of cannabis; this could, for example, be extended to driving without a license) and wishes to put ” more emphasis on community service “, Marine Le Pen castigates all the alternatives to imprisonment. She judges that there is ” only two types of sentences that can be understood by delinquents and criminals: fines and imprisonment “. She thus says she is in favor of the execution of very short prison sentences, of one or two weeks, and is in favor of the systematic establishment of minimum sentences – a measure unlikely to pass the scrutiny of the Constitutional Council.
Faced with the chronic overcrowding of prison establishments (France still has more than 70,000 prisoners for only 60,000 prison places), Marine Le Pen promises 85,000 prison places by 2028 against 60,000 in 2021. In 2017, Emmanuel Macron had promised 15,000 additional prison places, 7,000 have been delivered or are under construction.
Add street harassers to the sex offender registry
Marine Le Pen applies the same logic to minors, she intends to lower the criminal majority – “ for example at 16 “, she writes in her program without further details – and almost double the number of closed educational centers. An even harsher policy for foreign minors: in the event of conviction, it wishes to make it impossible to acquire French nationality. Emmanuel Macron offers him military supervision of juvenile offenders. Both programs also devote a chapter to violence against women. Marine Le Pen proposes to rely on the Spanish example by judging violent spouses or ex-spouses “ in very short time “, and wishes to register street harassers in the register of sex offenders.
Emmanuel Macron boasts about his record in the fight against domestic violence, highlighting the creation of 2,000 accommodation places and the training of 90,000 police and gendarmes, while feminist associations have had no stop pointing out shortcomings in this area. For the next five years, it announces the doubling of the number of investigators on domestic violence, the creation of a specific jurisdictional center and a file of perpetrators of domestic violence.
The “vigilant” Paris Bar Association, no instructions for Alliance
In a statement published three days after the first round, the Paris Bar Association, which brings together more than 40% of lawyers in France, recalls ” its unwavering attachment to the values of the Republic, to respect for the rule of law, to the guarantee of the rights of the defence, to the independence of the actors of Justice, and to the primacy of France’s international and European commitments “. In 2017, the Alliance union, the majority among the police, called for a vote for Emmanuel Macron to block Marine Le Pen. In 2022, this time he did not give any voting instructions.
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