2023-06-30 09:27:38
Urban riots are, alongside attacks and demonstrations by young people, the internal ordeal most dreaded by heads of state, whatever their political color. They know what can trigger them, they don’t control what can stop them. France experienced, on the night of Thursday June 29 to Friday June 30, a third episode of violence and degradation in several districts of the Paris region and provincial towns.
Follow our live: Aftermath of the death of Nahel M. live: during a third night of riots, 667 people arrested and 249 injured among the police
Blind and often unfair in the targeted targets, the rocks, fires and firework mortar fire show that the anger has still not subsided, three days after the death of young Nahel M., 17, shot at close range by a motorcyclist policeman during a refusal to comply, Tuesday, in Nanterre (Hauts-de-Seine).
Informed by the disastrous precedent of 2005, which resulted in twenty-one consecutive days of violence and urban degradation causing the death of three people, Emmanuel Macron took the exact opposite course to what Jacques Chirac had done when Zyed Benna and Bouna Traoré, two teenagers pursued by agents of the BAC, died electrocuted in an EDF transformer, in Clichy-sous-Bois (Seine-Saint-Denis), on October 27, 2005. He did not leave his Minister of the Interior trying to exonerate the police; he did not wait for the intervention of the prosecutor to declare on Wednesday that what had happened was « inexplicable » et « inexcusable ».
Read the story: Article reserved for our subscribers Death of Nahel M.: in Nanterre, Aulnay-sous-Bois, or Toulouse, a third night of riots in a surge of violence
Educated like all French people by an explicit video, its Prime Minister, Elisabeth Borne, was even more direct in noting that Nanterre’s intervention was not “obviously not in line with our law enforcement rules of engagement”. Thursday evening, the policeman who shot the shot was indicted for intentional homicide and placed in pre-trial detention, after the prosecution considered that “the legal conditions of use of his weapon [n’étaient] not met”.
Read also the interview with Jacques de Maillard: Article reserved for our subscribers “We are today in a situation where the balance of power dominates and where the specter of 2005 lurks”
Very tense and very uncertain situation
No offense to the National Rally and the right, who accused the Head of State of having intervened untimely by ignoring the separation of powers, the speed with which the police blunder was recognized and condemned at the higher level, and the consequent incarceration of the policeman, were fully consistent with the doctrine of the republican order. If they did not prevent the anger from pouring out during a new night, at least they avoided adding an additional layer to the feeling of injustice which nourishes the sporadic revolts of the working-class neighborhoods.
Read also: Article reserved for our subscribers Death of Nahel M.: Emmanuel Macron on a ridge line between the left and the police unions
The difficulty for Emmanuel Macron will be to hold this position over time, when barely out of the long pension dispute he again needs the assistance of the police to regain control of a situation which remains both very tense and very uncertain. No less than 40,000 police officers were mobilized overnight from Thursday to Friday in an atmosphere weighed down by the incarceration of one of their own. In recent months, police unions have been on the offensive to demand more means of action and defense.
A year before the 2022 presidential election, the main of them, Alliance, had succeeded in a show of force before the National Assembly by openly castigating the laxity of justice. If the blunder that has just occurred obliges him to exercise relative restraint, it in no way hinders his determination to influence the doctrine of the maintenance of order. It is this latent standoff that Emmanuel Macron must win in a particularly perilous context
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