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Trump Says Paris Attack Will Have ‘Big Effect’ on French Election Attack on Champs-Élysées Injects More Uncertainty Into French Vote
(about 5 hours later)
PARIS — President Trump inserted himself into the tumult of French politics on Friday, declaring that the fatal shooting of a police officer in central Paris would have “a big effect” when voters go to the polls on Sunday to choose among 11 presidential candidates. PARIS — It has almost become routine in France: A terror attack shatters the rhythms of daily life, bringing bloodshed and anguish. The assailant turns out to be someone known to authorities. What is different now is the timing, as Paris is again on high alert, less than 36 hours before the country goes to the polls on Sunday in one of the most tumultuous and unpredictable presidential races in memory.
Mr. Trump did not mention any candidates by name. But his statement on Twitter — “The people of France will not take much more of this. Will have a big effect on presidential election!” — came at the tail end of a tight, fragmented race, with at least four contenders running neck and neck. The brazen assault on Thursday by Karim Cheurfi, 39, a French national with a history of violence, left one police officer dead on the sidewalk of the Champs-Élysées. It has also given a potent opportunity for conservatives, primarily Marine Le Pen, leader of the far right National Front, to use the violence to try to stoke hostility toward immigrants and Muslims, as well as fears about whether citizens can be protected from terror.
One of them, Marine Le Pen, the far-right candidate, has issued grim warnings that a declining France is losing its identity, echoing Mr. Trump’s themes during the American presidential race last year. It was not clear, however, that Mr. Trump’s statement would help her among undecided voters. Barely a week ago, with her poll numbers sagging, Ms. Le Pen tried to rally her base with a raw appeal against Muslims and immigrants. It was unclear if her gambit was resonating. Now she and other candidates are jockeying to position themselves as tough on terror, amid revelations that Mr. Cheurfi, like several attackers before him, had been on the authorities’ radar.
In a statement on Friday, Ms. Le Pen blamed “radical Islam” — “a monstrous, totalitarian ideology that has declared war on our nation, on reason, on civilization” — for the attack Thursday night. The Paris prosecutor’s office on Friday acknowledged having opened a preliminary terrorism investigation into Mr. Cheurfi as recently as March 9. He had been arrested in February, only to be released for lack of evidence. Following Thursday’s attack, the police found kitchen knives, a gun and a Quran in the trunk of the car he was driving, as well as pieces of paper with scribbled allegiances to the Islamic State, which claimed responsibility for the attack.
The Islamic State claimed responsibility within hours of the attack, which also wounded two police officers and a bystander and briefly shut down the city’s most famous boulevard. Ms. Le Pen pounced, mocking the outgoing president, François Hollande, and vowing to be an unblinkingly tough leader.
On Friday afternoon, the Paris prosecutor, François Molins, identified the gunman as Karim Cheurfi, 39, a French citizen with a long record of violent crime, and provided an account of the attack. “For 10 years, under the governments of left and right, everything has been done to make us losers,” she said, speaking from her party headquarters outside Paris on Friday. “There must be a president who acts and who protects.”
At 8:47 p.m. on Thursday, Mr. Cheurfi arrived in an Audi off the Champs-Élysées, exited the car and opened fire with a Kalashnikov on a police vehicle, mortally wounding the officer who was in the driver’s seat. He then shot at police officers who were on duty outside a Turkish tourism office, injuring two officers, 34 and 31, and a bystander. He was shot dead as he tried to flee. But Ms. Le Pen was not the only one who stood to gain. Some analysts predicted that the principal electoral beneficiary could be the embattled mainstream center-right candidate François Fillon, who produced a book last fall called “Defeating Islamic Totalitarianism,” and who also uses harsh rhetoric to depict the antiterror fight as a war of civilizations.
Pierre-Henry Brandet, a spokesman for the Interior Ministry, told Europe 1 Radio on Friday that the police officers who killed the gunman had averted a “blood bath, a carnage on the Champs-Élysées.” Mr. Fillon, a former prime minister, and once the presidential front-runner, had languished in polls after becoming entangled in a nepotism scandal that led to embezzlement charges against him. But he has been gaining ground in recent weeks, and the attack might provide a final push.
“This was an individual who was known by the judiciary, who was known to police services, who was a dangerous individual,” he said. “You can imagine a movement toward one who has held power,” said Dominique Reynié, an expert on the far right who teaches at Sciences Po. “He’s written on terrorism. He’s been prime minister.”
A piece of paper found near Mr. Cheurfi’s body contained a handwritten message expressing support for the Islamic State; other papers, in his car, had addresses for the French domestic intelligence agency and for a police station in Lagny-sur-Marne, a town about 13 miles east of Paris. “For Marine Le Pen, it won’t have an effect,” Mr. Reynié said. “She’s already at the level she’s reached, partly because of terrorism.”
In the trunk of the Audi, investigators found a large black duffel bag containing a shotgun, ammunition, two large kitchen knives, pruning shears and a Quran. Throughout Friday, the authorities in Paris continued their investigation as more details became known about Mr. Cheurfi. He had been convicted of crimes four times and spent more than 10 years in prison, most of that time for shooting at police officers during a 2001 robbery, the Paris prosecutor, François Molins, acknowledged at a Friday afternoon news conference.
Mr. Cheurfi had spent more than a decade in prison. In 2001, he was charged with attempted murder after attacking three police officers, one of them while he was in custody. He was given a 15-year sentence. Three other convictions followed: in 2007, he attacked a prison employee; in 2008, he assaulted a fellow inmate; and in 2013 — following his conditional release from prison — he committed theft and drove a car with a stolen license plate. His arrest in February was for making anti-police threats, but the authorities lacked sufficient proof to hold him. Asked about his release, Christophe Rouget, a spokesman for one of the main police unions, said, “We live in a state of laws, after all,” citing the lack of probative evidence against him.
Last released from prison in October 2015, Mr. Cheurfi was placed under monitoring. Even so, police made Mr. Cheurfi the subject of a preliminary terrorism investigation, Mr. Molins said.
In January of this year, the Paris prosecutor received information that he was trying to obtain weapons and that he had made statements suggesting he wanted to kill police officers. But because there was no sign that Mr. Cheurfi was more than an ordinary criminal, the prosecutor in Meaux, a city about 30 miles east of Paris, near where he was living, handled the case. “Cheurfi’s criminal record, his trajectory, justified the pursuit of investigations by the antiterrorism branch of my office, within a terrorism context,” he added.
Mr. Cheurfi was brought in for questioning and his house was searched on Feb. 23 — the police found hunting knives, plastic ties masks and a Go Pro camera that he had ordered online — but the authorities did not feel they had enough evidence to keep him in custody. A man identified by BFM-TV as Mr. Cheurfi’s lawyer described him as “extremely isolated, a solitary person,” who spent much of his time playing video games. “His development had been blocked,” said the lawyer, Jean-Laurent Panier. “His father and brother were worried about him.”
“At this stage of the investigation, there appeared no connection with the radical Islamist movement nor any sign of support,” Mr. Molins said. The Islamic State has claimed responsibility for the attack, but Mr. Cheurfi’s neighbors in the Paris suburb of Chelles described him as quiet, and showing no obvious signs of radicalization. “Not very friendly. Fairly proud,” said Augusto Rodriguez, a neighbor.
Mr. Cheurfi was not flagged in the so-called S-files of the intelligence agencies, Mr. Molins said, because he had not shown any signs of radicalization during his time in prison. Nonetheless, in March, the authorities opened a preliminary terrorism investigation as a precaution. Mr. Cheurfi was not included among France’s notorious “S-Filers” — the thousands suspected of extremism whom the French state is officially surveilling, but does not have enough formal proof to arrest. The “S-Filers” have acquired near-mythic boogeyman status in the French imagination. On Friday, Ms. Le Pen called for their expulsion from the country, while earlier in the week, at a campaign rally in Marseille, she called them an “immense army of the shadows that wants us to live in terror.”
The treatment of the roughly 10,000 people law enforcement officers have flagged as possible Islamist radicals in the S-files was a focus of Ms. Le Pen’s rhetoric on Friday. She said that foreigners in the files should be deported; that those who are dual citizens should be stripped of their French nationality; and that those who are French should be prosecuted. Emboldened after the Champs-Élysées attack, Ms. Le Pen sought, as she often does, to place the antiterrorism fight as a struggle for the French soul. The idea is at the heart of her nationalistic campaign, and even as her momentum has slowed she has still placed first in many polls before the Sunday vote. “France is targeted not for what it does, but for what it is, and the French, for the simple reason that they are French,” Ms. Le Pen said.
Legal experts have noted, however, that the threshold for being designated for the S-files is very low compared with the evidence needed to secure a criminal conviction. The French government immediately reacted harshly to Ms. Le Pen’s demands — a measure of how seriously it took the potential boost of Thursday night’s shooting to a party it views as a threat to French democracy.
The conservative candidate François Fillon said that France needed to prepare for a struggle. “We are in a war that will be long,” he said in an address from his campaign headquarters. “The opponent is powerful; its networks are numerous; its accomplices live among us and beside us.” Ms. Le Pen “was seeking, like after every tragedy, to take advantage of it, in order to sow division,” said the prime minister, Bernard Cazeneuve. “She’s seeking to shamelessly exploit fear and emotion for exclusively political ends.”
Mr. Fillon said that, if elected, he would “take the diplomatic initiative” to broker consensus between Washington and Moscow on destroying the Islamic State “with an iron hand.” He added that “France’s Muslims overwhelmingly want to live their faith in peace,” and appealed for their help in combating fundamentalism. In the neighborhood where the attack occurred — a hybrid mix of the raffish and refined, visited by thousands of tourists daily — Ms. Le Pen’s proposals struck a chord. “She’s just gained one point in the polls. At least,” said Christophe Pohls, a barman at a cafe on the Rue de Ponthieu.
Prime Minister Bernard Cazeneuve responded to Ms. Le Pen and Mr. Fillon with a point-by-point rebuttal. “When you see what’s going these days, sure, sure, this helps her. She wants to close the frontiers. Pay more attention to what’s going on in France,” said Mr. Pohls, who approved Ms. Le Pen’s idea of expelling those named the S-Files.
“She has pretended to ignore that it was this government that restored border controls,” he said of Ms. Le Pen, noting that more than 2,300 officers had been deployed along France’s frontiers every day since the attacks in and around Paris on Nov. 13, 2015. He also noted that 117 people had been expelled from France over terrorist activities, and that Ms. Le Pen’s party had voted against laws that strengthened the government’s intelligence-gathering powers. His friend Henri Martins, in charge of security at a local nightclub, agreed. “Definitely a happy coincidence for her,” he said, as he vented against what he described as the porousness of the criminal justice system.
“For all of our citizens, for our entire country, this attack is a tragedy,” he said. “Ms. Le Pen seeks to make it an opportunity.” “They arrest these guys 10 times, then they let them out?” asked Mr. Martins, an ex-policeman. “Come on. For sure, this is going to pull up her score.”
He said it was hard to believe Mr. Fillon’s promise to create 10,000 police jobs, saying that when the candidate was prime minister from 2007 to 2012, he had overseen spending reductions that resulted in the loss of 54,000 jobs in the military and 13,000 in internal security. During that period, France, like many countries, was tightening its belt in response to the financial crisis. The attack occurred on Thursday night, but on Friday morning people in the neighborhood were still recovering.
The centrist independent candidate Emmanuel Macron urged France not to succumb to the fear that extremists seek to spread. “Hallucinatory. First, three shots, then four. We were in the middle of cooking, and we had to stop,” said Jean-François Desloovere, a cook at La Casita on the Rue Washington, just around the corner. “The minute you saw people running, you knew what was up.” He recalled looking down the normally packed Champs-Élysées “and it was totally empty,” with pedestrians pressing themselves against storefronts, “like flies stuck against the glass.”
“They want France to be afraid; they want to disrupt the democratic process; they want the French to yield to unreasonableness and division,” he said. “Our challenge is to protect the French, not to give up who we are, to stay unified and build a future.” At Le Carpaccio, on the Rue de Berri, terrified customers heard the bursts of gunfire, saw people running in panic down the busy street, and dove to the ground. “They went down on the ground, and broke all the glasses,” said Jamila Maachaoui, who was still sweeping up the glass on Friday morning.
Pierre-Henry Brandet, a spokesman for the Interior Ministry, told Europe 1 Radio on Friday that the police officers who killed the gunman had averted a “blood bath, a carnage on the Champs-Élysées.”
“This was an individual who was known by the judiciary, who was known to police services, who was a dangerous individual,” he said.