France in anarchy after teen’s killing
AT LEAST 719 people were arrested across France as violent protests against the police killing of a teenager continued for a fifth straight night, down from over a 1 000 the previous night, Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin announced.
Although Paris region was calmer, Nice and Strasbourg witnessed more disturbances while Marseille city saw worst clashes where the police used teargas to control crowd.
Rioters rammed Paris suburb L’Hayles-Roses mayor Vincent Jeanbrun’s home and fired rockets at his wife and small children, police said. Mayor Jeanbrun said: “It was an attempt at murder of incalculable cowardice.”
The government has deployed 45 000 police personnel, special units, armored vehicles and helicopters to maintain law and order.
The unrest is in response to the death of 17-year-old Nahel, who was shot dead during a traffic stop on Tuesday last week in the Paris suburb of Nanterre. Meanwhile, the rioting in France has spread to Belgium, with dozens of arrests being reported.
The riots represent a deeply unwelcome and perilous crisis for President Emmanuel Macron, just as he was looking to press ahead with his second mandate. The violence erupted just after Macron finally saw off half a year of protests over his controversial pension reform, which dominated the domestic agenda for most of this year.
But the images of shops ransacked and buses burned across the country also risk hurting Macron’s international standing at a time he wants to play an instrumental role in ending the Russian invasion of Ukraine and be seen as Europe’s number one powerbroker. The rioting forced him to cancel a state visit to Germany that was due to start this weekend and was to have been the first such trip by a French head of state in 23 years.
The postponement is doubly awkward for the Elysee as Macron had earlier this year put off a planned state visit by the UK’s King Charles III, which would have been his first foreign trip as monarch, due to the often-violent pensions protests.
He also cut short his attendance at an EU summit in Brussels this week.
After a first term that became dominated by combating the anti-government Yellow Vests protests and then the Covid-19 pandemic, the centrist’s second term again risks being marked by troubleshooting rather than implementing policy.
The riots broke out this week just as Macron was finishing a major threeday trip to the southern city of Marseille where he had sought to push an agenda of getting to grips with urban problems in France’s most disadvantaged areas. He was also mocked in foreign media, which accused him of attending the farewell concert of Elton John in Paris on Wednesday last week, hours before some of the worst rioting in recent days erupted.
Macron, whose ruling party lost its overall majority in parliament in the 2022 legislative elections, needs to tread a fine line domestically.
He is acutely aware that far-right figurehead Marine Le Pen has her eyes on taking the Elysee in the 2027 elections – which would wreck his legacy even if he cannot stand for election – and has nudged the government to the right on security matters. The eyes of the world are also on France as Paris gears up to host the Olympics in just over a year.