A teenager killed at a village fête in south-east France, a gardener attacked with a box-cutter after being the target of racist insults in a Paris suburb: On Monday, November 20, the leaders of the radical-left party La France insoumise (LFI), Jean-Luc Mélenchon, and of the far-right Rassemblement National (RN), Marine Le Pen – the two main figures of the opposition – each reacted publicly to a recent news story. But not the same one – intent as both leaders were on serving their own political agenda.

Mélenchon called the case of the gardener attacked in Val-de-Marne on November 17, by a septuagenarian who called him a "dirty bougnoule" [a derogatory term for a person of North African origin], an "Arabophobic" act.

In the wake of the death of the 16-year-old boy in Crépol, after knife-wielding assailants stormed the village hall, injuring eight other people, the far right has spoken of violence from housing estates and immigrant populations invading rural France – an interpretation of a news story that serves its electoral base.

Le Pen and her associates have not reacted to the attack in Val-de-Marne. Mélenchon and his supporters have said nothing about the death in the village of Crépol. Across social media, with its algorithms locking users in a cognitive bubble, each community comments passionately on "its" news item, without even having heard about the other.

MP François Ruffin of LFI expressed his dismay on November 21 in a message on X, attempting to reconcile the assaults on Thomas in Crépol and Mourad in Val-de-Marne. "A heavy, insidious, unspoken atmosphere reigns in the media, on social media: as if one had to choose sides, depending on the real or supposed origin of the victims or aggressors," he wrote. "As if, no matter what the subject, the rule had become hemiplegia, half-blindness in our humanity."

The identity, origins and motivations of the attackers in the southeastern village remain unclear, according to the public prosecutor in Valence, who said on Monday evening: "It is wrong to assert that the hostile group would be made up of individuals all originating from the same town and the same neighborhood."

The far right, however, wasted no time in trying to give an ethnic character to the incident. Le Pen presented it as a "razzia" – a word of Arabic origin which refers to Arab-Muslim incursions in ancient times. And she seems to have taken the origins and motivations of the perpetrators for granted, speaking of "people of immigrant background" engaging in "veritable punitive raids on villages".

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