French President Emmanuel Macron has decided to postpone his state visit to Germany today due to the wave of riots and looting that France has been experiencing for days after the death of Nahel, a 17-year-old teenager killed on Tuesday in Nanterre by a police officer for skipping a checkpoint. .
Macron and German Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier spoke by phone today. “Taking into account the internal situation, the President of the Republic has indicated that he wishes to be able to remain in France in the coming days,” sources from the Élysée Palace explained. Macron and Steinmeier decided to postpone the state visit “to a later date”, without specifying when it could take place.
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The state visit, which was initially scheduled to begin tomorrow and last until Tuesday, should have served to relaunch the Franco-German engine. Had it taken place, Macron would have been the first French president to pay a state visit to Germany in 23 years. The last French president to do so was the conservative Jacques Chirac in 2000. A state visit is the highest-ranking protocol visit to which a head of state can be invited.
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and Macron celebrated the 60th anniversary of the Elysee treaty in Paris in January. This treaty, signed in 1963 by Chancellor Konrad Adenauer and President Charles de Gaulle, sealed the reconciliation of France and Germany after World War II.
Scholz and Macron then considered the tensions of recent months between Berlin and Paris to be over, which had led to the suspension of the Franco-German council of ministers last October. Officially it was due to agenda problems of the ministers, although in reality it was due to their substantive divergences in matters of defense and energy policy.
France has been the scene for four nights of a wave of violence throughout the country, despite a strong police deployment. French police arrested 1,311 people on Friday night for taking part in riots, looting shops or causing vandalism. Since the protests began on Tuesday, the number of detainees has risen to 2,367 across the country.
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