French Leftist Anarchists Claim Responsibility for Cannes Power Outage Sabotage

Far-left anarchists have claimed responsibility for sabotage attacks on electrical systems and causing power outages in Southern France over the weekend, including at the Cannes Film Festival.

Posting on the far-left online platform IndyMedia, an anonymous group of anarcho-radicals claimed to have sabotaged key electrical infrastructure over the weekend, which left around 160,00 people without power in the Alpes-Maritimes department and around 45,000 in Nice.

The suspected sabotage attacks began in the late hours of Friday evening and continued through Sunday, briefly impacting the closing of the Cannes Film Festival, which the leftist arsonists branded an “obscene ceremony by a sea that has become a refugee cemetery.” However, the event organisers were able to run the programme off backup generators, and therefore, the finale was ultimately uninterrupted.

The supposed saboteurs, who described themselves as “two bands of anarchists”, said that their intention was to both interrupt the film festival as well as shut off power to Thales Alenia Space and other French defence contractors in the region, which they accused of fostering a world which “will not stop bombing, exploiting, extracting, grabbing, raping, ravaging, starving, machine-gunning, polluting, and exterminating, until everything is under its control.”

They accused the French government of being hypocritical, saying that while it preaches the principles of “progress on the international scene,” it is the second-largest arms exporter in the world behind the United States.

“French excellence in this area arms NATO and sows death, from Yemen to Gaza, from Ukraine to the Sahel,” they said, adding that the defence firms in the Cannes region employ thousands of engineers and technicians who “work there daily to develop these military (observation, communication, missile and drone guidance) and civilian (telecommunications, surveillance) satellites.”

Then, in a call for further action, the group urged their radical followers to “cut the power to what destroys us, sabotage is possible!”

“Turn off the screens, cut the highways, cut the pylons, turn off the artificial light, cut the TGV lines, cut telecommunications, cut the bulldozer pipes, turn off the power to the military industry, turn off the power to the factories, cut oil and gas pipelines, cut the measuring masts of the wind turbines, cut army supply lines, cut off water to industrial agriculture and electronics factories, cut the cables of photovoltaic power plants, cut the antennae, cut the bars of prison cells (and long live the attacks on jail!),” they said.

“Cut short reformist and authoritarian discourse, cut short the silencing and minimization of patriarchal violence, cut the pedestal of celebrities and other men of power, who attack and rape behind the scenes and on the battlefields, cut short those who say to wait, and… hold on. Courage.”

According to Le Figaro, investigators believe that the details in the post, such as the targeted sites, demonstrated that the alleged saboteurs were well informed, indicating that they are the likely culprits. Questions have also been raised about the potential of “internal accomplices” within the energy infrastructure system. So far, there have not been any arrests in connection with the attacks.

While infrastructure sabotage suspected to have been committed by the Russians often grabs international headlines, there is a growing phenomenon of far-leftists in Europe using such attacks as a part of their war on the support structures for modern life. For example, “ultra-left” terrorists were suspected of cutting railway cables and setting fires to several railway lines connected to Paris on the morning of the Olympic opening ceremony in the French capital last year.

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