Macron faces political firestorm after riots
Worst street violence in years comes six months ahead of one of Europe’s most closely watched elections
Sarah White and Leila Abboud in Paris
French President Emmanuel Macron and his embattled prime minister face a pile-up of crises after the country’s worst street violence in years drew accusations that the government had botched its policing operation.
Nationwide demonstrations on Saturday that brought together students protesting education conditions and citizens angry about the high cost of living descended into riots and looting, touching off a political firestorm.
Macron and his minority government, led by Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu, were already dealing with a looming budget battle, nervous markets and weeks-long protests in high schools.
Authorities on Saturday struggled to contain fires and looting by black-clad, hooded individuals.
Stores were ransacked, city halls attacked, buildings set ablaze and rioters clashed with police in cities across the country.
The scenes are a blot on Emmanuel Macron’s presidency six months before the high-stakes race to succeed him, and with far-right leader Marine Le Pen the frontrunner in polls.
Macron’s approval ratings are hovering close to 15 per cent, the lowest since he was first elected in 2017, while Lecornu’s are barely better at 22 per cent, according to an Ipsos poll before the unrest.
Before the fires were even out, political recriminations began to fly.
The government blamed the far left for fomenting violence, while the opposition was unusually united in attacking the interior ministry for losing control of the streets and being unprepared for a protest that was called weeks ago.
“There will be a ‘before’ and an ‘after’ this explosion of public anger, which is a big reminder of the darkest times of the Gilets Jaunes crisis,” said Bruno Cautrès, a political scientist at Sciences Po, in reference to the so-called Yellow Vest anti-government protests that rocked Macron’s first term in 2018 and 2019.
Saturday’s “apocalyptic scenes gave the impression that the state is no longer in control of the country, so this is an important experience that may affect how people vote”, Cautrès said.
The most obvious immediate winner was Le Pen’s Rassemblement National, he added, while the biggest losers — Macron and the prime minister — needed to urgently find real responses to reassure citizens and assuage jittery markets.
Macron sought to do so in a televised address on Sunday night as he promised Lecornu would bring together students, labour union leaders and lawmakers to devise “concrete solutions”, while prefects would improve security plans for future protests. “Yes, we need to sit down around the table and work together,” he said.
Le Pen said earlier on Sunday: “We are experiencing a profound crisis of trust and authority that poses a threat to democracy.
“Our country is caught in a vice . . . between violence and powerlessness,” she added, referring to the far left and government respectively. Her party posted on X on Sunday that she would “restore order” from Macron’s “chaos”.
Several opposition politicians said the force deployed on Saturday only amounted to 10,000 officers, whereas during the height of the Gilets Jaunes protests, police sometimes numbered above 60,000. The interior ministry said that number was incorrect, but declined to give another figure.
Domestic intelligence services had predicted that some 100,000 people or so would turn out on Saturday, but the actual number was about five times higher.
Some 1,500 stores nationwide were ransacked, according to early estimates. Riotous mobs attacked city halls in Lille, Marseille and Limoges.
Bruno Retailleau, leader of the conservative Les Républicains party — who served as interior minister under Macron until last year — said the government should have been better prepared after weeks of high school protests that have already led to more than 7,000 arrests.
“Rioters have also been a form of gangrene in the lycée [high school] movement.
Everyone knew that,” Retailleau, also a presidential candidate, told France 2.
Lecornu blamed violent far-left groups “trying to heat things up between now and the presidential election”.
Ministers denied they were underprepared. Interior minister Laurent Nuñez, a former police chief, said that roving groups of rioters, who at one point came close to the Élysée presidential palace, were hard to tackle. Some 1,000 officers and firefighters were injured in clashes.
In badly affected cities such as Limoges, where the city hall was destroyed in a fire, local officials said rioters were not airing particular grievances and had simply come to attack.
In central Paris on Sunday, the neighbours of a burnt-down restaurant by the badly hit Place de la République said looters had come with backpacks and filled them with alcohol bottles, cigarettes and phone SIM cards they immediately tried to resell.
Vadim Kantorov, who has lived in the area since 2015, said police were largely absent at that point in streets around the square, although officers were firing tear gas at protesters on the square itself. In previous protests, the entire neighbourhood had often been locked down hours in advance, he said.
“It gave the impression that police didn’t have the information about what was being planned, and that scares me,” Kantorov said.
The smell of burnt cars and city bikes hung heavy over the area, though an antiques market was under way on Sunday and many businesses were still open.
Sébastien Roché, a policing specialist at the CNRS research body, said a confrontational tone from Lecornu and the government towards recent student protesters had also worsened tensions.
In Paris, the official route for the demonstration was not agreed with police until late Friday, and the end point was set in a plaza that was too small to accommodate the large crowds, splintering them and making them harder to secure.
“Agreeing on a route the night before does not allow you to have police in the right places,” Roché said.
He added there had been serious warnings about violence.
“The intelligence work was maybe not very well carried out to start with, but also did not seem to have been taken into consideration enough or interpreted well by the [interior] ministry,” Roché said.
Police were criticised particularly by the far-left La France Insoumise during the student protests for using stun grenades and other non-lethal weapons that led to several grisly injuries.
The use of the grenades was suspended last week after a protester’s hand was blown off, but was reauthorised ahead of Saturday’s protests, only for another demonstrator to suffer the same injury.
Lecornu has criticised far-left leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon for not condemning Saturday’s violence sufficiently and accused his party of spending weeks whipping up the student protests.
Mélenchon has hit back, saying Lecornu was “responsible for the chaos he methodically prepared through incompetence”.
On Sunday, he suggested the government was deliberately allowing violence to spiral to justify its own crackdown and discredit the legitimate aims of the student protests.
“The heart of the matter is the protesters’ demands, the problems facing students and the high cost of living,” he told LCI news channel.
Far-right politicians including members of RN seized on the protests to assert a link with immigration, one of the party’s big battlegrounds, claiming young people from migrant backgrounds were more often responsible for acts of delinquency.
Police have not made that link explicitly and have said that many of the nearly 2,400 people arrested so far in the protests were adults, not youths.
The pressure on the government may come most immediately from the ground up, as many small businesses were devastated by looters. Some local officials in areas hit by riots also raised the stakes.
“I want to be able to rebuild our town hall with the same conditions as Notre-Dame cathedral… and the millions that go with that,” the mayor of Limoges, Guillaume Guérin, told LCI TV on Sunday.
“If I don’t get that pledge in 48 hours from the prime minister’s office or the Élysée, I’ll put my resignation on the table.”
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