There is only one clear winner so far from France’s chaos: Marine Le Pen. The violence and rioting that engulfed towns and cities across the country over the weekend, six months before a pivotal presidential election, is a godsend for the hard-right, Eurosceptical, anti-immigration candidate. As buildings burned, shops were looted and police attacked, the rioting largely drowned out peaceful mass protests over the dilapidated state of schools , fuel prices and the cost of living.
Across France and the rest of Europe, people are in shock at scenes of arson and pillage in city centres, the wrecking of symbols of the republic such as the 19th-century town hall in peaceful provincial Limoges and the bust of Marianne in Marseille’s city hall, and the looting of more than 2,000 shops.
Though France has a long revolutionary tradition, this was not the work of egalitarian insurgents or working-class warriors, but nihilist, anarchist “black bloc” gangs, with opportunist looters and rioters along for the ride.
Emmanuel Macron is a lame-duck president who has no practical answers to a crisis that is ruining his legacy. Macron expressed his “anger and shame” at the violence and the damage to France’s global image in a Sunday-night broadcast to the nation, but he is so widely loathed, including by many who voted for him in two presidential elections, that his pleas for order and dialogue were largely ignored.
Le Pen, in contrast, issued a solemn video message, looking presidential as she sat at a desk with the national tricolor (but no EU flag) and bookshelves as her backdrop. Millions of suffering French people were angry about “anarchic immigration” and the cost of living without smashing or burning anything, she said. They would have an opportunity in six months’ time to vote for a different path of “restored authority and security”.
Macron’s minority government is trapped in a vicious circle. France’s debt and deficit squeeze leaves him no spare cash left to buy off protesters. A decade of his centre-right presidency has failed to reform a bloated public sector or improve public services. The country has a youth crisis, characterised by anxiety over an economically uncertain future and amplified by social media, as well as a geopolitical crisis with Russia’s war on Ukraine spreading into a covert war against Europe.
Foreign critics of progressive European social policies are fanning the flames with incendiary commentaries. Donald Trump gloated on social media that “France is burning!”. Blaming the situation on immigration, he urged the French to “close your borders and take control before it is too late”. Vladimir Putin’s close aide Kirill Dmitriev described events in France as “the suicidal fall of Europe” and also ascribed it in part to chaotic migration.
The convergence of crises leaves little room for manoeuvre for a French government struggling to push even a mildly cost-cutting budget through a hung parliament. For now, it is trying to extinguish the violence with selective curfews. One presidential hopeful, Dominique de Villepin, who was a Gaullist prime minister 20 years ago, has even compared the situation to the eve of the fall of the ancien regime in 1788, a year before the outbreak of the Revolution, when France was stricken by drought, failed harvests and empty state coffers.
That may be a far-fetched parallel. But the sense of a fraying state, a discredited political class and an ossified bureaucracy unable to staunch a slow-motion financial crisis that might suddenly accelerate makes the stakes in next year’s presidential race ever-higher.
Until last weekend’s explosion, the school and student protests, unrest over the cost of living and outrage at instances of police brutality against young demonstrators all seemed to be lifting the campaign of radical-left firebrand Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who in some opinion polls had overtaken the centrist Edouard Philippe for second place. However, Mélenchon’s apparent refusal to clearly condemn the looting or attacks on the police, and his belittling of the violence as “disorder that is part of the events in the life of a society”, may cost him support among more moderate leftwing voters who have boosted Socialist candidate Raphaël Glucksmann in the latest opinion surveys.
Investors are taking fright at the violence and political instability, selling French stocks and bonds. A deepening market run on France could yet change the dynamics of the presidential campaign, rallying a frightened middle-class behind a seasoned centrist candidate seen as a safe pair of hands in a crisis.
A month after the May 1968 student-worker uprising that rocked Charles de Gaulle’s staid regime, voters scared by the spectre of civil unrest delivered a landslide victory to his party, which promised to restore order and authority. A year later, De Gaulle was disavowed in a referendum on regional devolution and resigned.
Historical comparisons are risky. Last weekend’s violence has increased the likelihood of a law-and-order backlash among voters that could propel Le Pen into the Élysée Palace. But if the financial situation worsens and the campaign turns on who can save the economy, she may yet lose out to a candidate who is firm on security and more orthodox on fiscal policy. Economics is Le Pen’s weak spot.
So far, neither Philippe nor other centrist and centre-right rivals have set the campaign alight. But six months is a long time in French politics.
