ISIS terrorist group has failed to mark French presidential elections
One of the pledges made by Le Pen is to roll back immigration and contain the spread of Islam in France.
Political scientist Gilles Kepel points out that, despite pollsters and pundits forecasts, Le Pen was beaten into second place by liberal Emmanuel Macron in the first round of voting.
f the wave of attacks from the 2015 Charlie Hebdo massacre to the 2016 Bastille Day truck killings in the French Riviera city of Nice had continued, the vote for the far-right National Front (FN) would have been much higher than the 21.3 percent Le Pen received on 23 April.
The jihadists failure to carry on the assaults stems in part from the fact that the Islamic State armed group’s caliphate in Syria and Iraq is under threat because it is being attacked, bombed on a daily basis, you cannot cross the border any more, you cannot get in, you cannot get out, according to Kepel.
Theyre trying to save their necks, they dont have much time to plot for attacks in Europe or in France or in the West, he concludes.
Kepel adds that the death of Rashid Kassim in a drone raid in February this year also contributed to the decrease in the number of jihadists acts of violence.
Kassim, a French national, has been linked to dozens of attacks in France, including the murder of a senior police officer and his partner near Paris last June and last July’s killing of Catholic priest Jacques Hamel in Normandy.
A third factor, says Kepel, is the significant progress made by French intelligence agencies in foiling Islamists plots thanks to improved electronic surveillance.
Source: RFI
