Macron to Fire Aide Who Hit Protester, but Pressure Mounts

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/20/world/europe/macron-fire-alexandre-benalla.html

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PARIS — After a day of intense pressure, the office of President Emmanuel Macron of France said on Friday that it was firing the aide identified this week in a video that shows him hitting a protester during a demonstration in May. But the announcement did little to quash a barrage of criticism directed at Mr. Macron.

The aide, Alexandre Benalla, 26, was identified on Wednesday by the newspaper Le Monde in a May 1 video that shows him wearing a police helmet as he grabs, drags and hits a man during a labor protest.

The decision to fire Mr. Benalla, who is being questioned as part of an investigation into the matter, came after officials initially suspended him without pay for 15 days and stripped him of his role organizing security for presidential trips, a punishment that critics said was too lenient.

Mr. Macron has yet to address the case directly, but political opponents have seized upon it to portray the president as a haughty ruler who flouts the law.

“This is the first big storm that his team is going through,” said Jérôme Fourquet, a pollster and political analyst at IFOP.

The presidency’s fumbling response has provided ammunition for Mr. Macron’s critics.

“On May 1, it was a minor news item,” said Olivier Faure, the head of the opposition Socialist party. “Since May 2, it is a state matter, because the authorities knew, covered up, and have been lying since.”

Mr. Benalla was an aide to Mr. Macron’s deputy chief of staff who had been in charge of security during the president’s 2017 campaign. Mr. Benalla was disciplined by his superiors after the May 1 episode, and had been warned that a new misstep would lead to his firing, but he continued to work for the presidency until the revelations this week.

The Élysée, France’s presidential palace, said in a statement on Friday that the presidency had learned of “new facts” that justified the decision to “initiate firing proceedings” against Mr. Benalla, notably that he was illegally in possession of material from Police Headquarters that he had procured “in order to prove his innocence.” The Élysée did not specify the material.

But in statements on Friday, Interior Minister Gérard Collomb and the Paris police prefecture confirmed news reports that three police officers working at the Paris headquarters had been suspended over suspicions that they had illegally passed on security camera footage of the May 1 episode to Mr. Benalla on Wednesday evening, when Le Monde broke the story about him.

On Friday, the Paris prosecutor’s office announced that Mr. Benalla had been taken into custody for questioning, on possible charges of assault by a public official, illegal impersonation of a police officer and misappropriation of footage from security cameras.

A second man, Vincent Crase, a reservist gendarme who had also worked on security for the Élysée and for Mr. Macron’s party, and who was sanctioned for similar offenses on May 1, was also taken into custody for questioning, the prosecutor’s office said.

None of those actions seemed to calm the fast-paced storm enveloping Mr. Macron.

Some opponents, citing press reports that Mr. Collomb had been aware of Mr. Benalla’s actions as early as May 2, have called for the interior minister to step down. The National Assembly, France’s lower house of Parliament, formed a special investigative committee, and legislative work ground to a halt as representatives pressed members of Mr. Macron’s government about the case, requesting that the prime minister, Édouard Philippe, address the matter.

Christian Jacob, who leads the right-wing Republicans in the National Assembly, said in Parliament on Friday that the episode showed the president was “surrounding himself with a gang of henchmen” instead of relying exclusively on the official security detail.

Since Le Monde’s revelations, news reports have detailed other instances in which Mr. Benalla was aggressive, in one case grabbing a TV reporter and yanking away his accreditation badge during the campaign.