• Many vaccination centers were vandalized this week, a symbol of a rise in violence among antivax people.

  • This increase in acting out was the result of Emmanuel Macron's speech on July 12, and the extension of the health pass.

  • Iris Boyer, specialist in extremism and polarization, discusses this violence.

Since Emmanuel Macron's speech on July 12 extending the health pass in France, violence has increased against vaccination and its representations.

A symbolic violence - the increasingly frequent comparisons with Nazism - but also a physical.

In the space of eight days, eleven coronavirus vaccination centers were vandalized in France.

The same week, BFM TV journalists were attacked during a demonstration against the health pass.

For Iris Boyer, secretary general of the ISD (think tank against extremism and polarization), this radicalization follows a classic pattern, but fortunately remains ultra-minority.

How to explain such passages to the act in the antivax, whereas the protest was until then mainly verbal?

The radicalization of the movement is a fairly logical phenomenon, this rhetoric existed but since the last announcements of the government, the noose is tightening in particular on the antivax, but also among opponents of the health pass, also in the minority. The health pass generalized to daily life creates a phenomenon of "them against us" - we have also seen many messages from vaccinated people on social networks mocking the unvaccinated after the announcements of Emmanuel Macron - and puts banished from society these people, reinforcing their feeling of ostracization.

We must nevertheless qualify and remember that this is a fairly heterogeneous movement that affects different sections of the population and traditionally opposed political sides, and that all of them are far from becoming radicalized. We cannot say that the whole anti-ax movement, and even less that against the health pass, has turned violent. But it is certain that, in some individuals, all this context favors the passage to the act.

This movement is also very instrumentalized by policies of all kinds, which are favorable or not, giving a magnifying effect which should not be neglected when analyzing it. We must compare the influence of this movement with its real number. They were 110,000 people to demonstrate against the health pass last Saturday, against 900,000 registrations on Doctolib on the only Monday of Emmanuel Macron's announcements. Throughout the week, nearly four million first-dose appointments were booked. We can therefore see that, if part of the movement is radicalized, it does not spread, and it is on the contrary the vaccine consensus, forced or not by the health past, which is gaining ground.

Exactly, this runaway for vaccination, which reduces the number of antivax, does it not also explain radicalization?

The more a movement becomes minority and ostracized, the more there is the risk of radicalization and of taking action within it.

He is forced to move on to stronger or more symbolic actions to make himself heard when one becomes an ultra-minority.

One can in particular quote the wearing of the yellow star in demonstration, which generalizes as the movement loses in strength.

In addition, the most consensual and reasoned voices have generally left the ranks, going for them to be vaccinated, which means that only the most radical voices remain which self-feed between them.

There are no more safeguards.

Is this violence likely to continue over time?

We can expect to see the violence continue or even increase because today we have entered into a balance of power, all the more so since the law was passed on Thursday evening. However, we have seen with the "yellow vests", that a protest movement could be perpetuated over time, especially with the help of social networks which make it possible to link people who would never have been able to meet or coordinate their actions. before that.

To take the parallel with the "yellow vests", the latter were based on the idea of ​​a public policy decided in Paris and for Paris, which would not be compatible with the province.

With the movement against the vaccine, there is an even more electric potential since we touch on the idea of ​​the interference of power on our body, we can therefore expect an even stronger radicalization of rhetorics and actions. .

The same goes for vaccination in children, again a powerful narrative.

There is therefore a risk of taking action, such as what we have seen with vandalism on vaccination centers, but also attacks on political figures or caregivers or places applying the health pass.

The violence is not over.

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