After days of violence and lack of control, order is slowly being restored to the streets of France. No one is considering the riots that broke out a week ago after the death of a teenager shot by a police officer on the outskirts of Paris. And episodes such as the attack with a car on the home of a mayor on Sunday show that a misfortune can happen at any moment.
But the “gradual” strategy of President Emmanuel Macron – empathy for the death of the young Nahel, massive police deployment, defense of republican institutions, including the police – seems to be showing the first results. Over the weekend the intensity of the altercations decreased. What happens in the next few days will indicate a possible way out of the crisis.
That the crisis has not ended is evidenced by the balance of the sixth night, the one from Sunday to Monday: despite the only 157 detainees —significantly less than the 719 and 1,311 in the two previous ones—, three police officers and gendarmes were injured, and 352 fires were recorded on public roads and 331 in vehicles and buildings, according to a provisional balance of the Ministry of the Interior cited by the France Info chain. A police post and a gendarmerie barracks were damaged.
“We will maintain the current level of mobilization until calm has fully returned,” Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin said Monday. For the fourth consecutive night, 45,000 police and gendarmes were mobilized throughout the territory. “The message”, added Darmanin, “will also be the same: firmness, arrests and appearance before Justice”.
In this week of chaos in France, in which at times political power has given the impression of being overwhelmed and without answers in the face of an unexpected outbreak, law enforcement have arrested a total of more than 3,000 people, a third of them minors. old. A thousand buildings have suffered fires or damage, piles of garbage and containers and 5,000 vehicles have burned, 250 attacks have been registered on police stations and gendarmerie barracks, and 700 police officers and gendarmes have been injured, according to data cited by the chain of BFM-TV television. The newspaper le parisien Evaluates the cost of damage to buses, trams and other public transport infrastructure burned by the violent at 20 million euros. In an interview with the same newspaper, the president of the employers’ association, Geoffroy Roux de Bézieux, estimated the damage in the private sector at 1,000 million euros.
There is an image cost as well. It’s not that it’s unheard of to see barricades burning or shop windows smashed during demonstrations in France. It happened this winter, during the demonstrations against the pension reform. But what was striking this time was the extent and virulence of the damage and its location: the banlieuesthe outskirts of French cities, where the population of immigrant origin is concentrated and which in many cases suffers endemic problems of poverty and marginalization.
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Those responsible for the violence and looting have turned Macron’s international agenda upside down, forced on Friday to cut short his presence at a European summit in Brussels and on Saturday to suspend a state visit to Germany. It has also opened up a question: what if something similar is repeated within a year, when the Paris Olympic Games are held in the summer of 2024, an event that will attract visitors and that should be a world showcase for Paris and France? ?
These have been sleepless days in the corridors of power. And of balances. This is what government sources, who requested anonymity, described on Monday as a response in three “times”: first, the emotion over Nahel’s death; second, the work of justice to establish the truth of the facts; and third, firmness in the face of violence in the streets. These sources defend that, given the demand of the right and the extreme right to apply emergency measures such as the state of emergency, a “gradual” response was chosen, which included forceful police deployment with elite units such as the RAID. , from the police, and the GIGN, from the gendarmerie. To this is added, according to the same sources, the dialogue these days with associations on the ground and with the Nahel family.
One of the messages that the Executive insists on is that “this has not been a revolt in the neighborhoods.” He maintains that the first victims of violence have been the neighborhoods themselves: public infrastructure, private vehicles, shops. After the initial outrage, calls for calm have multiplied, from Nahel’s family to the stars of the soccer team or influencers on social networks. There is beginning to be fed up with the riots in the banlieu.
Everything has happened in a heated political environment. The France Unsubmissive of Jean-Luc Mélenchon, sister party of Podemos and hegemonic on the left, has resisted for days to call for calm. The far right has become embroiled in defending the police, while some groups — including the main police union — stir up the specter of civil war and stigmatize suburban Frenchmen. An internet collection for the family of the police officer accused of “voluntary homicide” in the death of the young Nahel already adds up to more than one million euros.
This crisis, unlike that of the yellow vests or that of pensions, does not focus on the figure of Macron, but affects something deeper and older: the fracture in France of the banlieu. This Monday, the president has received the presidents of the National Assembly and the Senate, and on Tuesday it will be the turn of 220 mayors of municipalities that have suffered destruction and looting.
At noon this Monday, rallies were called before the town halls of France. The attack on the house of Vincent Jeanbrun, mayor of L’Haÿ-les-roses, a city of 30,000 inhabitants to the south of Paris, has sounded the alert about the drift that could take the damage to public buildings —from town halls to schools — and attacks on elected officials. Attacks on councilors are not a new problem. They come from long before Nahel’s death and were committed, in some cases, by extreme right-wing groups. The Prosecutor’s Office is investigating what Jeanbrun and his family suffered – a vehicle crashed into his house – as an “assassination attempt”.
Macron considers that the priority is to restore public order and the return of calm. This was made known on Sunday, in a meeting at the Elysée Palace, to his prime minister, Élisabeth Borne, and his interior and justice ministers, according to a person present at the meeting. The source added that “the president wants to start with a long-term and detailed work to understand in depth the reasons that have led to these events.” The most difficult is yet to come.
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