New Year’s Eve passed off peacefully in France give or take the odd incident. There were 211 arrests in total, announced Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin, but overall the country saw in 2024 with good cheer.
In the days leading up to the last day of 2023, there were ominous warnings from the government about the possibility of a terrorist attack. Nearly 100,000 police, gendarmes and soldiers were deployed the length and breadth of France to counter such a threat but nothing materialised.
For a decade ‘populist’ has been the insult of choice for European centrists to describe anyone who dares deviate from their progressive dogma
Emmanuel Macron is praying that 2024 will be similarly uneventful from a security point of view. As the president said in his traditional New Year’s Eve address to the nation, this year is going to be a special one for France: not only is the country hosting the summer Olympics for the first time in 100 years, but the reconstructed Notre Dame cathedral will be unveiled, five years after it was ravaged by fire.
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