French Riots: Legacy of the Colonial Past or Result of Free Immigration?
© AFP 2023 / Denis Charlet
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Tiberio Graziani, chairman at Vision & Global Trends International Institute for Global Analyses, and Alternative for Germany (AfD) MEP Gunnar Beck discussed the ongoing riots in France over the shooting of a 17-year-old youth of Algerian descent.
The riots broke out in the Parisian suburb of Nanterre on June 27 after police shot and killed 17-year-old Nahel Merzouk, a delivery driver of Algerian heritage, after pulling over his car. The officer who fired the fatal shot was soon charged with manslaughter.
Since then the unrest has spread across France to Lyon and Marseille, and even to neighbouring Belgium and Switzerland. One firefighter has been killed and hundreds of police and gendarmes injured. President Emmanuel Macron has drawn ridicule by blaming the violence on video games.
Tiberio Graziani put the situation down to a number of factors — not just immigration but the lack of integration, France's colonial history and the Brussels-dictated attacks on workers and pensioners' rights by Macron and his predecessors that provoke the Gilets Jaunes (Yellow Vests) protests of recent years.
"There has been no social peace in France for years now," Graziani said. "The phenomenon of the so-called gilets jaunes has held the French authorities in shame: protests by the gilets jaunes have recently been joined by protests against policies relating to retirement."
Gunnar Beck said France had an "extremely liberal" immigration policy and a series of governments had "let the problem fester in the so-called bidon-villes in the banlieus."
"Demographic maths have played out, and the French police and judiciary cannot contain the problem anymore," Beck said. "The immigrant populations are a huge financial burden the French taxpayer, which will eventually lead to the collapse of the welfare state. France today is a much more violent and divided country than 50 or 60 years. These problems will only get worse."
Eric Zemmour, the leader of the right-wing French Reconquête (Reconquest) party, has warned: "We are in the early stages of a civil war. This is an ethnic revolt.”
Beck said the assault by rioters on the home of Vincent Jeanbrun, the mayor of the wealthy southern Parisian suburb of L'Haÿ-les-Roses, in which his wife suffered a broken leg, marked a "new stage" in the unrest.
"The violence is now spreading from the inner cities and the banlieus to the rest of France. No one and nothing is safe anymore," he warned. "In other European countries with high immigration, such as Germany or Sweden, migrant communities have not yet been able to coordinate and execute such a complex endeavour. It is, however, only a question of time until this will happen."
Graziani said immigration was the "workhorse" of Zemmour's party, but warned that "what we are seeing in France right now could happen in other parts of Europe."
"Europe as a whole has failed to understand the historical significance of immigration, to manage the enormous flow of immigrants," the Italian stressed.
Both commentators agreed that Europe had learned nothing from the migrant crisis of 2015, which saw 2 million trafficked migrants from the Middle East and Africa settled in Europe, more than half of those in Germany, while thousands more drowned in the Mediterranean.
The policies of European governments and the Brussels-based European Union "have not succeeded in managing, in one way or another, the so-called immigration issue in more than twenty years." Graziani said. "Even in countries considered more democratic and advanced, the problem of immigration and integration remains unresolved."
Beck said Germany alone had accepted up to 7.5 million non-European migrants since 2018 alone.
"Germany will cease to be a mainly German country within the next 10 to 12 years," the German predicted. "The same will happen in France and Sweden, although it may take up to 15 years.
The police killing of Nahel Merzouk has drawn comparisons with the death of black US man George Floyd while resisting arrest by the Minneapolis police and the ensuing Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests and riots. Could a European equivalent of BLM coalesce?
"It is probable that something analogous to the BLM also takes place in France, in view of the colonial past of this country," Graziani said.
But Beck noted that equivalents to BLM already exist on the eastern side of the Atlantic. "Most parties on the left, and some parties in the centre, have become the lobbyists for more immigration and more anti-racist measures to accommodate them."
"As traditional voters are turning to nationalist or conservative parties because of the decline of civil order and economic conditions, the Left is winning new voters amongst immigrants," Beck argued. "This strategy may ultimately stop the current resurgence of the conservative right, but at the expense of Europe’s economic future."
