Some of the phrases - now seen liberally used in western media - appear to be maters published about Gujarat riots of 2002. Take a closer look ...
As buildings burned, shops were looted and police attacked, the rioting largely drowned the peaceful mass protests over the dilapidated state of schools , fuel prices and the cost of living. But all these are about France.
But there is more. The only one clear winner so far from France’s chaos: Marine Le Pen.
Peter McPhee, a professor emeritus at the University of Melbourne, described the protests as a “Christmas present” for Le Pen’s National Rally ahead of the presidential election.
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.
Marion Anne Perrine "Marine" Le Pen (born August 5, 1968) is a French lawyer and politician who has been parliamentary party leader of the far-right National Rally.
She had also been president of the National Rally 2011 to 2021.
She ran for the French presidency in the 2012, 2017, and 2022 presidential elections.
Le Pen has been the member of the French National Assembly for the 11th constituency of Pas-de-Calais since 2017.
Emmanuel Macron is under attack and has emerged 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.
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.
Le Pen is now positioning her party as more capable than centrist or left-wing forces ahead of the presidential election in April 2027.
On Sunday, the leader of the National Rally party, or RN by its French initials, railed against President Emmanuel Macron’s handling of the crisis in a video statement, saying the outgoing centre-right leader no longer has any “credibility or authority” and that the country’s people were caught between his austerity “hammering” them on the one hand and “insurrectionary activists” on the left on the other.
Le Pen blamed the political left and “decades of immigration” to France for the looting and destruction that trailed the demonstrations, and presented her party as capable of restoring order — without offering any firm evidence to back up assertions that the rioting was led by immigrants.
The politician is already far ahead in recent polls, and some say she is likely to be the next leader.
Some 550,000 people demonstrated on Saturday, according to the Ministry of the Interior, although protest organisers put the figure at 800,000. Protesters included students, union groups and supporters of the “yellow vests” movement, which protested against inflation back in 2018, at the start of Macron’s presidency.
Although most marched peacefully, masked groups attacked city halls in several cities on Saturday, including the 19th-century City Hall in the city of Limoges, which was badly damaged.
In Lyon, a tourist office was set ablaze. In Marseille, hooded individuals attacked a police station. The city has since banned protests.
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.
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