Alliance, one of the main police unions, on Wednesday invited the presidential candidates to a “big oral” on security issues that only the right and the far right accepted, as well as the Minister of the Interior .Valérie Pécresse (LR), Gérald Darmanin on behalf of putative LREM candidate Emmanuel Macron, Éric Zemmour (Reconquest!) and Marine Le Pen (RN) took part in a debate held at the Club de l’étoile cinema. PS candidate Anne Hidalgo and communist Fabien Roussel declined the invitation, as did Yannick Jadot (EELV). As for Jean-Luc Mélenchon (La France insoumise), Alliance did not invite him. “What’s the point of discussing with a candidate who only advocates anti-cop hatred, police bashing?”, Alliance secretary general Fabien Vanhemelryck told AFP. “It would not have advanced the debate.” These few contenders for the Elysée had fifteen minutes to present their “vision of tomorrow’s security” before answering questions from the room. To launch the debate, the first of its kind for a police union, Alliance chose the film Bac Nord, which was inspired by the true story of three police officers implicated for their excesses in the northern districts of Marseille. right-wing and far-right candidates have referred to it to support their security proposals, to the chagrin of its director Cédric Jimenez, who claims not to have been informed of this “unfortunate political recovery”. At the microphone of France Inter, the director also clarified: “It’s disturbing, it bothers me a lot, because a film remains a cinematographic work and it cannot become a political object. Me, I am very embarrassed by that […]. I repeat, this is a film, not a documentary or a hidden camera. I made a film with a point of view. It is a very particular, exceptional case, where cops found themselves in prison. It doesn’t happen every day. It does not represent the daily life of the neighborhoods, nor that of the police. They don’t do operations like that every day, every week, it’s wrong, so it’s a film, a fiction, which focuses on a legal case. It’s as if we said that after seeing ‘Scarface’, we considered that all the exiles of the Castro regime were gangsters.” The film had been accused, in July 2021, the day after its screening at the Cannes Film Festival , to participate in the rise of the extreme right, according to an Irish journalist: “When I leave your film, I say to myself, maybe I will vote for Le Pen.” The film was also criticized for having had treatment partial of the case of these corrupt police officers.Upon its release, the feature film was a success, with 2.3 million admissions in France.It was subsequently nominated for the Césars 2022 seven times, notably in the Best Director and Best Editing categories.
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