Russia isn’t the biggest worry in Macron’s crime-ridden France

February has not started well for the European Union. On the first day of the month, furious farmers surrounded the parliament in Brussels, chanting defiance and throwing eggs at the people they blame for demeaning their industry. On Saturday, a man stabbed three people at the Gare de Lyon in Paris. The suspect in custody is from Mali but had lived legally in Italy since arriving in 2016. During questioning, the 32-year said his actions were motivated not by religion but by historical grievance, for what France ‘had imposed on his grandfather’. As has become the custom in these type of attacks, the initial explanation for the man’s rampage was attributed to ‘psychiatric problems’. That was also the excuse for the man who, in December, was accused of stabbing to death a German tourist in Paris.

The French right isn’t particularly interested in the motivations of the assailants; what concerns them is whether or not they should have been in France.