ELAINE GANLEY, AP
LYON, France (AP) — There's no doubt that an extreme-right French group known for violence and large doses of anti-Semitism doesn't like journalists or the establishment.
"You lie ... you spend your time at society soirees ... you are the system!" Steven Bissuel, the boss of the Lyon chapter of the Union Defense Group (GUD), hissed at an Associated Press journalist.
Marine Le Pen, the far-right French presidential candidate, may not personally know Bissuel or his "black rats," as GUD members call themselves. She also many not individually know their extreme-right brothers down the cobblestone street in old Lyon, the militants of Identity Generation, whose speeches and shock tactics can have strong racist overtones.
But members of France's extreme-right subculture have a growing footprint in Le Pen's anti-immigration National Front party and in her campaign. Le Pen's willingness to bring them into her fold runs counter to her efforts to purge National Front ranks — including her own father, the party's co-founder — to transform the longtime pariah party into a mainstream political force.
Leading figures who once hailed from both extremist groups are donning suits and taking on roles in Le Pen's bid for victory in France's two-round April 23-May 7 presidential election.
___
The militants of Identity Generation and GUD — which have no known formal links to each other and different ideologies — share a common fear that immigrants will take over France and Europe, uprooting Western civilization. They have a ferocious desire to erase all traces of Islam from French soil, where an estimated 5 million Muslims live.
Bissuel's GUD "redecorated" a local Starbucks, stickering its windows with a caricature of a black man's face to protest the company's decision to hire 10,000 refugees around the world.
"Yankees, refugees, go home!" Bissuel said in a video.
Paris GUD chief Logan Djian, who sports a tattoo of the SS Charlemagne division, was jailed for bloodying a rival in a violent, humiliating confrontation that was posted in a video online. He has relocated to Lyon.
The far-larger identity movement is known for holding sausage-and-wine street fetes — items forbidden to Muslims — famously organized a "march of pigs" in Lyon in 2011 and once occupied a mosque's roof in Poitiers, where invading Muslim armies were stopped in the 8th century.
There is an ideological compatibility between the National Front and the identity movement, said Sylvain Crepon, a leading far-right expert. Le Pen must show party members that she remains an anti-establishment figure even as she runs for the French presidency.
"It's dangerous ... she is playing with fire," he said.
___
A self-described patriot, Le Pen hopes to extract France from the European Union and do away with France's membership in the shared euro currency. She pounds away on the disadvantages of "massive immigration" like a drum major.
The tactic has set the tone for the French presidential campaign and may help her to a spot in its May 7 presidential runoff. Polls suggest she could be one of the two top-voter getters on April 23, along with independent centrist Emmanuel Macron, sending them into the runoff.
