🇫🇷Weekly Dispatch - France is burning
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🇫🇷Weekly Dispatch - France is burning
France is burning, Emmanuel Macron postpones his state visit to Germany, and Xavier Bertrand fights for space within Les Républicains.
The Weekly Dispatch is your weekly update on major events in French and European politics, published on Sundays to give you the ideal summary of current affairs.
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This week
🔥France is burning
🇩🇪Macron postpones state visit to Germany
🥊Xavier Bertrand fights for space within LR
🔥France is Burning
Let’s not beat around the bush this week: France has a very serious problem, as the scenes above from Lyon show
Due to the unfortunate murder of the young 17-year-old driver, Nahel M on Tuesday, France has found itself swept up in an almost week-long riot that has caused untold levels of material, financial, and human damage.
If you want to understand how this all started, read this article:
Unfortunately, despite some politicians calling for calm and public figures outright asking the rioters to stop, there was a limited effect across the board.
Scenes across France have mimicked what we’ve seen previously, with cars being smashed, flipped over and set on fire, and public services needing to be halted to prevent unnecessary dangers for state employees and precious material like trains and busses.
We have even seen scenes where off-duty police officers who have been recognised and beaten into an unconscious state by out-of-control children who have, clearly, been failed in some capacity and at some level in their lives.
Following the young man’s funeral on Saturday, his mother, Mounia, made it clear that she blamed nobody but the officer for her son’s death, and yet this did not have as strong an effect as most would have liked.
Although things appear to have calmed down more in general across the country, things have worsened in some areas as the embers of anger continue to burn.
Vincent Jeanbrun, the Les Républicain mayor of L'Haÿ-les-Roses in Paris, found himself and his family the target of an ‘assassination attempt’, where rioters rammed their car into his house and then set it on fire in an attempt to burn the house to the ground.
His wife, who was home alone with their two children, was injured along with one of their children in her attempts to protect them from harm.
With the number of arrests having increased night-on-night since the rioting started, we finally saw a drop in the number of arrests, with the provisional tally stating that only 700 individuals were detained on Saturday 1 July.
This was accompanied by a report that 45 police officers and gendarmes were injured during the night’s violence, along with 74 buildings being damaged (including 26 police and gendarmeries) and 577 vehicles set on fire.
This is roughly half of the figure of the Friday night riots, with 1,300 being arrested and 2560 fires reported across public roads.
The anger against much of this behaviour is beginning to dissipate, but I fear that we have more than a few days of this chaos left before the rioters have tired themselves out and the state has managed to retake control.
However, there are serious questions regarding what is happening now, with children as young as 12 and 13 having been arrested for participation in these violent acts and an average age of 17 among the rioters.
We have some very serious questions to ask ourselves in France regarding what is happening to open the door to such violence and to such dissatisfaction amongst our citizens.
And this isn’t necessarily as easy as stating that the individuals taking part have been side-lined by society or a lack of funding for certain social strata and regions.
But, for a more in-depth analysis of this, look forward to an additional dispatch during the week.
🇩🇪Macron postpones state visit to Germany
You’d be forgiven for thinking that this rioting had only impacted the French political scene. However, these events naturally impact a country’s geopolitics and international relations for obvious reasons: the need to assure domestic security and international credibility.
Forced to withdraw from the European Council Meeting in Brussels on Friday 30 June, to head a government crisis meeting following the third night of violence in France, missing the discussions that took place on migration, China, and the economic competitiveness of the EU.
Not only this but despite attempting to postpone the decision for as long as possible in the hopes that the situation would improve, French President Emmanuel Macron found himself forced to postpone his state visit to Germany due to the worsening unrest in France.
In a statement released by the Élysée, it was stated that “given the internal situation, the president has indicated that he wishes to be able to stay in France for the next few days… The two presidents therefore agreed to postpone the visit to Germany to a later date”
President Macron took the decision with German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier on Saturday, officially postponing what would have been the first state visit since Jacques Chirac visited Berlin in 2000.
Having been planned with the explicit goal of reinforcing Franco-German relations and facilitating discussions on energy, industrial and foreign policy, and a discussion on the current state of play with China, you can see why the decision was pushed back so far.
With the state visit likely needing to be postponed to after the summer, this will delay initiatives that both states wanted to engage in, slow cooperation between them, and limit the time left for any initiatives they wanted to wrap up before the start of the 2024 European Elections.
Which, naturally, helps nobody.
🥊Xavier Bertrand fights for space within LR
Moving away from the rioting (for now), we turn our eyes to one of the more interesting politicians right now: Xavier Bertrand.
A long-time member of Les Républicains, the president of the Hauts-de-France region was a candidate in the LR primary against Valérie Pécresse, Eric Ciotti, and Michel Barnier, crashing out in the first round of the two-round election.
Since then, he has been part of the party’s soul-searching regarding the future, and while many have turned further right in an attempt to overcome the challenge that Marine Le Pen poses to the right, some are turning to the centre.
As you may remember from last summer, Xavier Bertrand launched a new movement/party called “Nous France” (We France en bon anglais), which was intended to be “republican, popular and humanist, from the right and from the centre”.
Still affiliated with LR, Bertrand is now fighting for space for a stronger social centre-right wing of the party while leaning on a political line focused on “authority, the value of work, the social ladder and the promotion of the middle class”.
Having postponed their 1st party congress due to rioting, they have still been working on constructing their party and benefiting from Bertrand’s popularity.
As mentioned in Le Monde, Annie Genevard, the secretary general of LR was positive when speaking about him, noting that “he remains popular in the polls and embodies a different sensibility on the right” and is, therefore, an important part of the right-wing family.
He’s even managed to increase his popularity with several acts, such as being outspoken on the recent pension reform debate and, in the words of his former Républicains colleagues, the most important thing being that “he did not hide”.
The playing field within the party continued to be fluid, with the nationalist right coalescing around party president Eric Ciotti and the fight for a social right taking place between Bertrand and the pension reform rebel Aurélien Pradié.
However, Aurélien Pradié is still relatively young and needs additional experience before he can launch a leadership challenge for any wing of the party, Bertrand is safer than many would expect.
He would also likely be the more palatable choice for many of LRs allies, such as the centrist Union des Démocrates et Indépendants, who have been increasingly alarmed by the hard-right turn of the Républicains.
However, there’s another challenge for Bertrand coming further from the centre, with the ongoing manoeuvring within the Presidential majority.
With Emmanuel Macron currently unable to present himself for a third term, several actors who are originally from the centre-right are positioning themselves for this fight, including Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin, Minister of the Economy Bruno Le Maire, and former Prime Minister Edouard Philippe: all former LR deputies.
However, this is politics, and the sands of fortune are always shifting, so nobody knows what may happen over the next four years to improve the position of any of these centre-right politicians, who all have presidential ambitions and ideas for our nation.
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🇫🇷Weekly Dispatch - France is burning
I think it also speaks to parenting issues if children are being allowed to participates in riots. I get that it’s harder with 16/17 yr olds. But letting your 12 yr old out is a safeguarding issue IMO.
"The anger against much of this behaviour is beginning to dissipate"---This is hard to believe. The French public has to be enraged.