The French extreme right has suffered two setbacks in as many days, with the banning of Unité Radicale (UR), the movement to which President Jacques Chirac's failed assassin belongs, and the annulment of the re-election of Mrs Catherine Mégret as the mayor of Vitrolles. Mrs Mégret is the wife of Mr Bruno Mégret, whose MNR party split from the National Front three years ago and has close links with UR.
"Merci Maxime!" says UR's website - an allusion to Mr Maxime Brunerie, the 25-year-old football hooligan and extreme right-wing militant who fired a shotgun at Mr Chirac on July 14th. Mr Brunerie is in a ward for suicidal patients at a hospital near Paris. The investigation indicates that he planned the attack, and if, as expected, a judge pronounces him sane in September, Mr Brunerie will be charged and tried.
Mrs Mégret's re-election in March 2001 was annulled by the Council of State yesterday. Her socialist opponent filed a lawsuit saying that Mrs Mégret's campaign tract attacking a third candidate gave her an unfair advantage. The decision reduces from four to two the number of French cities controlled by the extreme right.
French newspapers now call groups like UR, which are secretive, self-avowedly racist, anti-Semitic and violent, the "ultra right". Their members continue to frequent the extreme right-wing parties of Mr Jean-Marie Le Pen and Mr Mégret, bolstering the groups' "security services" on occasion and sometimes participating in election campaigns. Two UR leaders joined the national council of Mr Mégret's MNR at its party congress in February 2002. Mr Brunerie stood in the 2001 municipal elections on an MNR ticket and campaigned for the MNR in last month's legislative elections.
The UR was banned under a 1936 law forbidding private militias and paramilitary groups. The measure will become official once it is approved by the Council of Ministers, probably tomorrow. UR's spokesman Mr Guillaume Luyt predicted the banning would attract members to the movement, which would simply regroup under a new name.
France has grappled with the legality of extreme right-wing parties since Mr Le Pen began gaining significant support 20 years ago, and the banning of UR has renewed the debate.
Some socialists wanted the National Front to be outlawed when Mr Le Pen reached the second round of the presidential election on April 21st, saying France should act "before it is too late" to stop the rise of the extreme right. However, opponents said it would merely drive the extreme right underground, and that activists should enjoy freedom of speech unless they are blatantly racist or advocate violence.
Today's Le Monde newspaper carries a report on the popularity of neo-fascist movements among lycée students in the Languedoc-Rousillon region and across the border in Spain. The teenagers listen to "makina", a Spanish mixture of military marches and hard rock. They dance holding an arm and hand in a Hitler salute, and wear T-shirts, sweatshirts and jackets with the brand names Pitbull and Killoff.
"These clothes are the sign of our racism," two teenage girls boasted to Le Monde's correspondent in a small town near Perpignan.
"We don't want this filth around us," a "makina skin" said, referring to Arabs, gypsies, Jews and homosexuals. "We must exterminate people who don't have pure roots. We are for the final solution."
Between 1990 and 1995, skinheads with similar opinions murdered three Arabs and a Jew in four separate incidents. A report by the French domestic intelligence agency, the Renseignements Généraux, dated nine days before the attack on Mr Chirac, called UR dangerous and "the most active political organisation within the ultra movement".
UR was created in June 1998 to federate the Union Defence Group (GUD), also known as the "Black Rats". The GUD started in 1968 in the Assas law faculty as an extreme right-wing backlash to the mini-revolution of May 1968.
Mr Brunerie transferred €5,680 from savings to a current account in June and spent €311 on a rifle and ammunition eight days before he tried to kill Mr Chirac. Police found bomb-making ingredients and Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf in Mr Brunerie's parents' home.