- Eighteen serving officers who signed letter to Macron are to be fired, it emerged
- But despite anger, right-wing politicians like Rachida Dati are backing the troops
- Dati said that the concerns of the soldiers reflected a very real terror threat
- The mayor of the 7th arrondissement said the police were the targets of jihadists
A Paris mayor has backed military chiefs who threatened to seize control of the country to fight radical Islam and prevent the ‘disintegration’ of France.
Eighteen serving officers who were among the hundreds of retired soldiers who signed the open letter to Emmanuel Macron are to be fired, the country’s armed forces chief confirmed today.
But despite widespread condemnation, politicians on the right like Rachida Dati, mayor of the 7th arrondissement, continue to throw their support behind the signatories, who included 20 retired generals.
‘What is written in this letter is a reality,’ Ms Dati told France Info radio today. ‘When you have a country plagued by urban guerrilla warfare, when you have a constant and high terrorist threat, when you have increasingly glaring and flagrant inequalities … we cannot say that the country is doing well.’