Anti-corruption investigators have raided the home and party headquarters of Jean-Luc Mélenchon, prompting a furious – and potentially illegal – protest from the leader of France’s hard left, reports The Guardian.
The raids – part of twin inquiries into the alleged misuse of European parliament funds and suspected funding irregularities in Mélenchon’s presidential campaign last year – took place on Tuesday at the offices of his party, France Unbowed, and private apartment.
In video shot by reporters at the scene, Mélenchon, 67, railed aggressively at a police officer standing in front of the door to the party’s offices in the rue de Dunkerque, near the Garde du Nord, repeatedly demanding he not be touched.
“We are not thugs, we are not bandits,” he shouted. “In whose name are you preventing me from entering my party’s office? Go away and do your work as republican police officers. I am the republic; I am an MP.”
The far-left leader continued: “Are you not ashamed? You are the police of the republic, or you are a gang? Do you know who you are talking to? You know who I am? Do I represent nothing to you?”
As the officer refused to budge, Mélenchon urged parliamentary colleagues and party staff who had accompanied him – several of whom wore the red-white-and-blue sash of members of the French national assembly: “Kick down the doors, comrades!”
The group subsequently entered the offices by another door and objected forcefully to the investigators’ presence, prompting them to leave before the search was completed, according to a reporter from the Libération newspaper who was at the scene.
Later, standing outside, Mélenchon called the raids an “enormous operation by a politicised police force”, adding in a video posted on his Facebook page that the searches were “a politically motivated act, an act of political aggression”.