LThe leader of La France Insoumise, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, was summoned by the police on Tuesday to “answer a complaint of insult” after his comments drawing a parallel between the president of the University of Lille and the Nazi Adolf Eichmann.
“On Tuesday, September 24, I have to respond to a complaint for insult launched by a Macron minister regarding my reaction to a banned conference in Lille,” he wrote on X on Sunday.
According to a source close to the case, this is a summons by the police as part of a preliminary investigation.
“There will be no prosecution by the public prosecutor, there is no apprehension of criminal law on this subject,” assured Mathieu Davy, Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s lawyer, to AFP.
At the end of April, the Minister of Higher Education, Sylvie Retailleau, announced that she was filing a complaint against the former presidential candidate for “public insult”.
He had mentioned the Nazi war criminal during the campaign for the European elections on April 18, during a speech in Lille, organized in the middle of the street after two conference cancellations by the prefect and the president of the university.
“‘I did nothing,’ Eichmann said. ‘I only obeyed the law as it was in my country.’ So they say they obey the law and they implement immoral measures that are not justified by anything or anyone,” he said.
He later indicated that he had made reference to the philosopher and political scientist Hannah Arendt.
“It explains how evil, absolute evil, always tries to dilute itself, by compartmentalizing tasks,” he said the following day on BFMTV, considering that the president of the university had “behaved in this logic of the propagation of evil.”
“First adjective wrong”
“All of a sudden, we don’t know why, a whole series of us – what could possibly be going on? – are once again being summoned to police stations,” declared the rebellious tribune this week during a conference in front of the La Boétie Institute – the LFI think tank – which he co-chairs.
“There will undoubtedly be indictments, in my case it is absolutely certain, because I made the huge mistake of thinking that the university professors who were after me, or the Minister of Higher Education, had heard of Hannah Arendt once in their lives,” he also said ironically.
The European election campaign was marked by various legal episodes for the rebels.
The leader of the LFI deputies Mathilde Panot and the MEP Rima Hassan – then simply a candidate – were questioned at the end of April by the Paris judicial police as part of investigations for “apology for terrorism” after comments linked to the situation in the Middle East, summonses described as “censorship” by La France insoumise.
“At the first wrong adjective, you are entitled to be summoned to the police station, to explain your conception of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” Jean-Luc Mélenchon denounced again this week.
