One year ago today, a 17-year-old called Nahel Merzouk was fatally shot by a policeman as he sped away from a vehicle checkpoint in western Paris.
What followed shocked France. Days of rioting, looting and burning across the country. Not just in the inner cities but in provincial towns such as Montargis in central France, where a mob vandalised the town hall and pillaged scores of shops. ‘I still have people who almost a year later don’t want to come back to the centre because of the riots,’ said one shopkeeper this week. ‘They’ve been apprehensive ever since, traumatised, even though we’re a fairly quiet town.’
For millions of French people the riots were more disturbing evidence of the parallel society that has emerged this century
The people of Montargis voted overwhelmingly for Jordan Bardella in the recent European elections. The president of the National Rally received 30 per cent of the vote, more than twice that of Macron’s candidate, in second place. In the 2019 European elections, Bardella had triumphed over Macron’s party by a mere 2 per cent. Such is the effect the riots had on the people of Montargis.
There will be a remembrance rally for Nahel on Saturday, organised by his mother, who says it will be a gathering not just to honour her son but to protest against ‘police impunity’. The policeman who fired the shot remains under investigation for intentional homicide but he maintains he acted in self-defence, as does his colleague, who said of Nahel, ‘the end was dramatic, but it was his actions that led to it’.
The day after the rally the French go to the polls, and for many the death of Nahel and the riots that followed will influence how they vote.
The left-wing la France Insoumise (LFI) will benefit from the inner-city vote, particularly among Muslims, 62 per cent of whom voted for Jean-Luc Melenchon’s party in the European elections. In Nanterre, where the shooting occurred, LFI won a landslide victory, taking 36 per cent of the vote, three times more than the National Rally. LFI received 11 per cent of the vote in Montargis.
Having lost white working-class voters to the National Rally, LFI have had to search for a new demographic and they have found one in France’s Muslim community. Fervently pro-Palestine (one of its senior MPs described Hamas as a ‘resistance movement’ a week after the terrorist group had massacred 1,200 Israelis), LFI is a fierce critic of the police and what the party regards as their shoot-to-kill policy.
But for millions of French people the riots were more disturbing evidence of the parallel society that has emerged this century. It is a society marked by a violent disdain for Republican authority, which manifests itself from time to time in rioting and looting: in October 2005, after the death of two teenagers as they fled from the police in northern Paris; in 2007, after a similar incident; in 2009, 2013 and then in 2014, when a Pro-Palestine march through the Jewish suburb of Sarcelles turned into an orgy of anti-Semitic destruction.
Equally troubling for millions of French people is the weakness displayed by successive governments in confronting this parallel society.
Emmanuel Macron responded to the death of Nahel by calling it ‘inexplicable’ and ‘inexcusable’. Marine Le Pen challenged the president’s remarks. ‘Is the act inexcusable? Is it inexplicable?,’ she retorted. ‘It’s up to the courts to answer… the president is prepared to forget constitutional principles in an attempt to put out a potential fire.’ Many of the public rallied to the policeman’s side; an online fund for his family raised more than €1 million (£850,000) in four days, to the anger and embarrassment of the government and left-wing politicians.
Macron subsequently gave a more considered response to the riots, blaming them on a ‘desire for revenge against the police, the state and everything it stood for’. He also talked of the ‘de-civilisation’ of France – as he had in an interview a few weeks before – and promised ‘to get on with the job of re-civilising’. That task has proved beyond him. If anything, France has become more uncivilised in the last year because of the blowback from the conflict in Gaza. Anti-Semitic attacks have rocketed by 300 per cent, and earlier this month a 12-year-old Jewish girl was raped by two boys her own age as a ‘punishment’ for Palestine.
In an interview this week, Macron raised the spectre of a ‘civil war’ in the event of an election victory for Marine Le Pen. They were the words of a desperate president with nothing left to offer his people other than Project Fear. But the people are already fearful, that is why they are turning to Le Pen’s party in such vast numbers. They think the civil war has already started.
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