President Emmanuel Macron’s choice to dissolve the National Assembly in the wake of the European elections risks strengthening the clout of the far right on French politics. The ideology of the Rassemblement National, entirely focused on the creation of differentiated rights on racist and reactionary grounds, cannot exist without a strong, centralized power structure, on which has been significantly expanded over the past decade. That’s why we have no doubt that a far-right government will use and reinforce the surveillance of the population to exercise its power. It will for example need police databases to identify people from whom to withdraw rights, a surveillance ecosystem to track down people it wants to deport, abuse or lock up, or censorship and coercive laws to silence anti-fascist opposition.
We didn’t have to wait for the Lepéniste party for authoritarian surveillance to take root in our daily lives. Over the past decade, in the name of “efficiency”, “crisis” or “urgency”, the center-Left President of the Republic François Hollande and his successor Emmanuel Macron have — with the support of the right and far right – have adopted numerous securitarian measures and increased the number of surveillance devices, while discarding safeguards and checks and balances. While claiming to be moderate, their governments have systematically justified the legalization of new surveillance measures, on the grounds that they were adopted within a democratic framework and would be “properly” used.
But surveillance tools are never neutral when they give a government the ability to know, and therefore control, its population. From the outset, they have been designed to detect “weak signals” and find the “enemy within”. Discriminatory abuses are an integral part of the logic underlying these technologies, but are exacerbated when they are in the hands of the far right. For example, as we explained, the edifice of police databases, conceived in France at the end of the 19th century and built up bit by bit over several decades, was already ripe when the Vichy regime was established in 1940. The possibility that these files could be used to identify and arrest people was in fact intrinsic to this system, and it was simply a matter of the Petainist power adjusting its uses.
The same blind logic is repeating itself. For twenty years, successive governments have been installing and trivializing the tools that will be used by the extreme right to implement the segregated, unjust and authoritarian world for which it has been campaigning for years.
An all-powerful administration
The first tipping point is undoubtedly the 2015 state of emergency. It overturned the functioning of the rule of law by altering the historical balance of institutions. The role of judicial judges, who are supposed to be the only ones with the power to restrict individual freedoms according to the Constitution, was reduced in favor of the role entrusted to the administration, on the pretext that the latter could act more swiftly. Numerous abuses were noted during the state of emergency, with the use of measures massively targeting Muslims or environmental activists. This exceptional regime was extended by the 2017 law “reinforcing internal security and the fight against terrorism” (SILT), which brought it into ordinary law. Since the, the Minister of the Interior has been able to request house arrests or bans to attend public events with a simple notification to a public prosecutor, all in the name of preventing terrorism.
This strengthening of executive powers has spread beyond the anti-terrorist framework. Little by little, since 2015, the administration has reactivated or obtained numerous powers. It has thus become increasingly common for prefects (local representatives of the government) to ban demonstrations or interventions in the name of public order. Since 2023, they have also been able to use surveillance drones and, since 2021 in the name of the Separatism law, to deprive associations of their subsidies. Since the 2023 Olympic and Paralympic Games Act, they can also experiment with algorithmic video surveillance. Can we seriously imagine that a far-right government would refrain from using these broad powers? Assigning left-wing activists to house arrest, multiplying drones over working-class neighborhoods or banning anti-racist events, RN-appointed prefects will have numerous repressive levers at their disposal.
As for the Minister of the Interior, he has reinvested the power to dissolve associations. Even before the legislative reform ushering in an era of mass dissolutions, the interior minister started with Muslim organizations such as the anti-islamophobia group CCIF, then moved on to radical left groups like the Bloc lorrain or the Défense collective in Rennes. Jordan Bardella has promised to step up his such disbandments even further.
A weakened justice system
The increase in administrative powers has been accompanied by a challenge to the founding principles of justice. With the creation of a “fixed fine” (amende forfaitaire délictuelle), the judicial judge has for instance been sidelined. Since 2016, lawmakers have has been able to stipulate that, for certain offenses, criminal proceedings will stop automatically when the person being prosecuted pays a fine. In other words, the police can now put pressure on people by offering them a Cornelian choice: asserting their rights before a judge or pay a few hundred euros and call it a day. In recent years, the range of offenses covered by this “amende forfaitaire délictuelle” have been considerably extended, with, for example, drug use or, during confinement in 2020, leaving the house without a certificate.
But it is above all on the internet that this bypassing of the judge has been most completely assumed. Since 2014 and a law carried by socialist minister of the Interior Bernard Cazeneuve, the police has been able to request that websites remove content they consider to be of a “terrorist” nature. While we have always denounced the risks of political censorship and arbitrariness of this mechanism entrusted to the administration, in this case the Anti-Cybercrime Office at the ministry, our fears have been confirmed on several occasions. Nowadays, online platforms and social networks even collaborate actively with the government when it asks them to remove content. For example, during the uprisings in the summer of 2023, the Ministry of the Interior “summoned” certain social networks, and Snapchat publicly admitted to removing content at the government’s request, outside any legal procedure. Worse: when Prime Minister Gabriel Attal recently took the illegal decision to censor the Tiktok social network in New Caledonia, on the grounds that the platform had allegedly played a role in the riots on the island, he set in motion an unprecedented infringement of freedom of expression that the courts to put to an halt. It’s easy to see how such censorship could be expanded in the future, particularly by a far right government.
Technopolice everywhere
At the same time, police surveillance capabilities have been enormously strengthened. The number of police database (created by simple decree) exploded, access to them has widened, and oversight or remedies against abuse are virtually non-existent (the LOPMI of 2022 even removed the formal requirement of clearance to consult them). The taking of identifiers (DNA, fingerprints and facial photos) as well as the request for unlock code from the phone have become systematically used to put pressure on people in police custody, although this is generally illegal as it is uncorrelated with any ancillary offence. What’s more, this information can now be used in the street, via mobile tablets, enabling gendarmes and police officers to step up their harassment of people in police custody.
Technologies have also evolved: facial recognition has become commonplace and is frequently used in legal proceedings through the TAJ file, analysis software of metadata make it very easy to create social graphs and track people’s habits, spyware can now be used to remotely activate the geolocation function of a mobile device, and the police increasingly have open-source surveillance tools (OSINT) at their disposal without any legal basis. What’s more, since 2016, investigators are authorized to use even more intrusive techniques such as public address systems, computer data capture, IMSI catchers, image capture or infiltration in proceedings related to “organized crime”. This category covers a very broad range of offenses, and was notably invoked to prosecute environmental activists who blocked a Lafarge cement plant, or to justify the arrest of Kanak independence activists in June 2024.
Intelligence have also seen their surveillance powers expanded since they were formalized by the 2015 Intelligence Act. We have denounced on numerous occasions the fact that this law legalizes the possibility of using numerous intrusive means of surveillance, for very broad purposes, and in particular the surveillance of activists. These possibilities for abuse have become more and more concrete over the years, through, for example, the surveillance of yellow vests, or various cases where activists have found surveillance equipment targeting them (see, as an example, the hidden camera in front of the Tanneries self-managed space in Dijon, the microphone in an anarchist bookshop in Paris, or the GPS beacon under Julien Le Guet’s car from the environmental “Bassines Non Merci” collective).
In its activity report for the year 2022, the intelligence oversight agency (Commission nationale de contrôle des techniques de renseignement, or CNCTR) has moreover expressed concerned about the increased surveillance of activists. It has also warned that its control capabilities are inadequate, preventing it from keeping up with the latest technological developments, particularly when it comes to spyware and other remote computer intrusions.
Finally, dangerous precedents have been set with the continued expansion of exceptional justice measures applicable in matters of terrorism, and the growing involvement of anti-terrorist services in political affairs. The so-called “December 8” case is a sad example: the ruling handed down at the end of December 2023 by the Paris correctional court confirms that left-wing activists can be prosecuted and convicted for terrorist “association de malfaiteurs” on the basis of suspicions of intent, without any proven project, and that protecting one’s communications through free software and end-to-end encryption can be used as evidence of “clandestine behavior” to justify conviction.
The surveillance and repression of activist movements, particularly environmentalist or anti-authoritarian ones, is no longer a fear, but already reality, all the more so as it has been accompanied for several years by a nourished discourse aimed at criminalizing any form of protest outside the simple electoral framework (union actions, street demonstrations, etc.). It would be all the worse under a RN majority.
Illusory safeguards
Surveillance and repression systems are already in place, and institutional and political safeguards are no longer sufficient to curb authoritarian political will. We’ve been noting this with frustration for years: law doesn’t prevent the massive spread of surveillance technologies turned against the population. France’s supreme administrative court, the Conseil d’Etat has validated the legality of virtually all the police databases that have been challenged before it, including the political and religious filing of PASP and GIPASP.
The Constitutional Council, for its part, almost systematically considers that laws sufficiently protect freedoms, most often deferring case-by-case control to other bodies, such as administrative courts, unable to prevent systemic abuses in the use of surveillance measures. This deferral of control of legality by the Constitutional Council to the administrative courts also has the consequence of placing the burden of legal challenge on civil society, or on the victims of this upsurge in surveillance, who have to go to court to see redress and respect for their basic human rights — admittedly without much success given the low number of victories.
Finally, in material terms, independent administrative authorities such as the CNCTR or the CNIL (data protection authority) cannot reasonably monitor every action by law enforcement and intelligence agencies. In the particular case of the CNIL, there is also a lack of political courage which explains its inaction, or even a willingness to help the government legalize new surveillance measures, as was the case with drones or the VSA.
If all this is frightening, it should be far from surprising. For years, associations, jurists, academics and grassroots activists have been warning of this slow decline in the rule of law. All the Rassemblement National has to do now is follow in the footsteps of previous governments and make use of the existing legislative arsenal. Its program is profoundly racist, sexist and LGBT-phobic, and no longer even hides its ambition to reduce individual rights and freedoms. We don’t even dare to imagine how easy it would be for this party to implement its authoritarian measures and rights-restricting policies once in this context.
Faced with this threat, we are calling for mobilization so as not to see these tools of surveillance and repression fall into the hands of the Rassemblement National, nor allow Emmanuel Macron’s “extreme-centrists” the opportunity to destroy the last safeguards of the rule of law. We call on you to campaign and vote massively against the right and extreme right at the next legislative elections.