France mourns attack victims ‘two years’ on

Macron in control

PARIS, Nov 13, (Agencies): France on Monday marked two years since its worst ever terror attacks, when jihadists killed 130 people in Paris and injured hundreds of others.

“Two years on, Paris remembers,” the city’s mayor Anne Hidalgo tweeted, with the hashtag “Fluctuat Nec Mergitur” — battered but not sunk, Paris’ motto — which became a defiant slogan after the attacks.

President Emmanuel Macron was laying wreaths at the six locations where gunmen and suicide bombers struck on Nov 13, 2015, targeting the national stadium as well as bars, restaurants and the Bataclan concert hall.

Accompanied by his wife Brigitte and his predecessor Francois Hollande who was president at the time, Macron began his tributes at the Stade de France stadium north of the city where a suicide bomber killed one person.

Families of the victims joined their minute of silence and were due to join commemorations at the Bataclan, where 90 were gunned down and blown up during a gig by US rock band Eagles of Death Metal.

Macron was due later to meet members of victims’ group Life for Paris as they released balloons into the skies over the capital to remember the dead.

Abdeslam

The attacks profoundly shook France, triggering a state of emergency that was only lifted this month after Macron signed a controversial new anti-terror law.

The law gives authorities sweeping powers to search homes, shut down places of worship and restrict the movements of suspected extremists.

Some 7,000 troops meanwhile remain on the streets under an anti-terror operation known as Sentinelle, carrying out patrols and guarding vulnerable sites such as tourist hotspots.

The Paris attacks were among a series of jihadist assaults that have left more than 240 people dead in France since 2015, starting with the shooting at satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo.

The sprawling police investigation into the Paris attacks continues following an international manhunt for Salah Abdeslam, the only man directly involved in the attacks to have survived.

Abdeslam, a 28-year-old petty delinquent turned jihadist, was captured in a dramatic police operation in Brussels in March 2016 after four months on the run.

Police had hoped he could provide a wealth of information about the planning and execution of the attacks, but he has so far refused to cooperate with the investigation.

Meanwhile, two years after militants killed 130 people in coordinated attacks across Paris, French officials say there remains an unprecedented level of “internal” threat from both within and outside the country.

With Islamic State losing ground in Iraq and Syria, hundreds of French citizens — and in some cases their children — have started to return to France, leaving the government in a quandary over how to deal with them.

For the first time as president, Emmanuel Macron will pay tribute on Monday to the victims of the mass shootings and suicide bombing that took place across Paris and in the city’s northern suburb of Saint-Denis on Nov. 13, 2015.

The attacks, the deadliest on French soil since World War Two, prompted the country to strike back, joining international military operations targeting IS and other Islamist militant groups in Iraq, Syria, Libya and elsewhere.

There has also been the passage of more stringent French legislation, with the most recent law, effective this month, giving police extended powers to search properties, conduct electronic eavesdropping and shut mosques or other locations suspected of preaching hatred.

Conservative politicians say the regulations don’t go far enough, while human rights groups express alarm, saying security forces are being given too much freedom to curtail rights.

Macron — often parodied for his ‘on the one hand, on the other hand’ policy pronouncements — has emphasised the need to balance security and liberty. While he has ended the state of emergency brought in after the attacks, heavily armed soldiers still patrol the streets of Paris daily, and barely a week goes by without a police operation to round up suspects.

According to the interior ministry, extraordinary measures have helped intelligence agencies thwart more than 30 attacks in the last two years. Last week, the police arrested nine people and another was apprehended in Switzerland in a coordinated counterterrorism operation.

“What worries us are plans for terrorist attacks prepared by teams that are still operating in fighting zones in Syria and Iraq,” Laurent Nunez, head of France’s internal intelligence agency DGSI told French daily Le Figaro in a rare interview.

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Triggering

Alarm

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In his first six months in power, French President Emmanuel Macron has chalked up one reform after another in a whirlwind that has nevertheless seen his poll numbers plummet.

The former investment banker’s stunning rise cast aside France’s traditional left and right, creating a solid centrist front for his new Republic on the Move (REM) party.

In short order, the 39-year-old has scored three major legislative triumphs, beginning with a law to clean up politics, followed by flagship reforms to France’s complex labour code and a controversial anti-terror law.

The labour reforms sparked strikes and street protests, but they paled in comparison with those that have thwarted similar attempts by his predecessors.

But the young leader’s zeal for reforms — and the use of executive decrees to overhaul the labour code, seen as a strong-arm tactic — has come with a cost.

The man who won two-thirds of the vote in May has an approval rating of just 32 percent in a YouGov poll out Nov 2.

But insiders says his poll standings do not worry him.

“He has a very long-term outlook and won’t give up,” one close associate said.

The 2017 election left Hollande’s Socialist Party in disarray, while the right-wing Republicans party is split between those who joined Macron’s REM, such as Prime Minister Edouard Philippe, and those who want to stay in opposition.