As France Rocked by Riots Again, Macron Looks Like 'Spent Force'
© AFP 2023 / SARAH MEYSSONNIER
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France has already seen five consecutive nights of violence after the shooting of 17-year-old driver of Algerian descent Nahel Merzouk by a police officer. What do the immigrant riots mean for the country and Emmanuel Macron's presidency?
"Immigrant riots are an already old and frequent occurrence in France where a large legal and illegal population of mostly African and Near Eastern origin has not been successfully assimilated and does not regard itself as French," Come Carpentier de Gourdon, geopolitical analyst and convener of the editorial board of World Affairs, told Sputnik. "The second or third-generation youth is troublesome, frustrated and aggressive as it has internalized grudges against the former colonizers and thinks it has a right to live by its own rules. Its educational level is generally low and work opportunities are few."
"Drug dealing has become very prevalent in many low-income peripheral neighborhoods and brought much illegal wealth to the ring leaders of the local gangs (…) In one sentence, many of those immigrants belong to broken tribal societies where ethnic and religious solidarity is the main bond and where the values of civility and respect for a 'foreign' elected and bureaucratic state structure are largely meaningless."
Nahel Merzouk, the teenager of Algerian descent, was shot and killed by a police officer during a traffic stop on June 27. As per the Daily Mail, the passenger who was with Nahel in the car at the time of the shooting, broke his silence on July 1, claiming that one of the police officers threatened the teenager and allegedly told him: "Don't move or I'll put a bullet in your head." The passenger went on to claim that the second officer said: "Shoot him." The first officer allegedly hit the teenager with the butt of his gun two times. After that Merzouk released the break and was then shot down.
French firefighters extinguish burning vehicles following protests in Nanterre, west of Paris, on June 28, 2023.
© AFP 2023 / Zakaria Abdelkafi
The 38-year-old police officer who killed Merzouk has been put under investigation over charges of voluntary homicide. The policeman's lawyer disputed claims that the officer had threatened to shoot the teenager in the head before firing.
Meanwhile, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) subjected Paris to criticism, as Merzouk's death became the third fatal shooting by law enforcement officers during traffic stops in France in 2023, and the 21st since 2020, according to the mainstream media.
Nationwide Protests
The teenager's death became a pretext for nationwide protests. On July 1, around 45,000 French policemen were deployed throughout the country. The protests spilled over into Switzerland and Belgium. Over 100 rioters attacked shops and police officers Lausanne, while in Belgium's capital Brussels, protests kicked off on 30 June and proceeded relatively peacefully.
Commenting on the unfolding havoc in France, leader of the right-wing French Reconquete party, Eric Zemmour, stated: "We are in the early stages of a civil war. This is an ethnic revolt.... The French are witnessing what it means to be the product of mad immigration."
"Police brutality is more of a pretext than a real cause for most rioters, despite real cases of abuse of power and unjustified violence," said de Gourdon. "Lawbreakers of immigrant origin seek to use their identity to claim virtual immunity. They often refuse to obey police summons on the grounds that they are discriminated against and many threaten and insult the police. They thus put themselves in the situation of being suspects and dangerous and those who are law-abiding among them get painted with the same brush."
A firefighter uses a water hose on a burnt bus in Nanterre, outside Paris, France, Saturday, July 1, 2023.
© AP Photo / Lewis Joly
If organized crime and drug-related gangs hijack the protests, it could pose a serious challenge to French national security, warned Paolo Raffone, a strategic analyst and director of the CIPI Foundation in Brussels.
"The appearance in the riots of Kalashnikovs is not a good sign," Raffone told Sputnik. "Many countries in Europe live under enormous economic distress that has left social scarfs and divide lines within the society. This situation is the result of the neoliberal privatization policies enforced by the EU and the governments over the past 30 years. After the terrorist legislation enacted in 2001 and the austerity policies after 2008, the pandemics and the central banks' rise of interest rates to combat the inflation, the situation is generally steaming up in all European countries. Emulation processes may easily occur if triggered by an accident."
Macron's Handling of Protests Raising Questions
The Elysee Palace expressed criticism over the killing of the teenager, with President Emmanuel Macron condemning the incident as "inexplicable" and "unforgivable." For his part, Minister of Internal Affairs Gerald Darmanin argued that the death of Nahel "cannot justify the disorder and the delinquency." What's more, earlier this year the nation had already been rocked by a series of protests and civil unrest over Macron's unpopular pension reform.
"Macron is trying to save his presidency. Therefore, his approach is more moderate than that of the minister of interior (…) Macron has probably been behind the arrest of the police officer. However, Macron cannot blame his security forces, because many think that he is too soft on these issues of riots. In fact, Macron has authorized a strong militarized intervention of the security forces, but he cannot blame a social group, even less an ethnic or religious group, so he talks about digital platforms," explained Raffone, referring to the French president blaming computer games and adolescent maximalism instead of mentioning police brutality as the cause of the protests.
As per de Gourdon, "Macron is a very unpopular president and has steadily seen his grip on power loosen as he lost his parliamentary majority last year and has had to enforce many decisions by Decree (49-3)."
In addition, the French president's party does not look like a unified and influential force, but more like an ad hoc gathering of individuals whose only bond is their acceptance of Macron’s leadership, according to the geopolitical analyst. Still, he does not think that the president will step down prior to the next presidential election.
Nor will Macron hold a new parliamentary election in the near future, "for fear that the result may be even less favorable to him than the last ones, so he may remain as a lame duck president served by a practically insignificant prime minister for the rest of his tenure, unless some even more dramatic events bring about a Constitutional crisis on the scale of what happened in 1959 or 1968," per de Gourdon.
The analyst believes that the party most eligible for taking power in the current circumstances is the second largest and one of the oldest in the National Assembly, Marine Le Pen's National Rally. He noted that the party "enjoys wide popular support despite the excoriation in which it is held by the establishment parties at the center and on the left and the international condemnation it is under almost since its inception."
"At a time of national emergency that appears imminent, it is the only nationwide force probably capable of upholding law and order, whereas Macron increasingly looks like a spent force," de Gourdon concluded.
