French Interior Minister Laurent Nunez admitted police lost control during violent weekend protests as President Emmanuel Macron called for a security review.
PARIS: French police “lost control” during nationwide protests marred by violence over the weekend, the interior minister admitted Monday, with President Emmanuel Macron calling for a security review.
Macron also refused Interior Minister Laurent Nunez’s resignation even as he acknowledged security and intelligence failures in the government response.
Saturday’s demonstrations saw some half a million people turn out across France to protest the cost of living, but morphed into some of the worst violence to rock the country in years, with town halls and shops looted and set ablaze.
More than 2,500 people were arrested, while almost 1,000 members of the security forces were injured. Injuries were also reported among protesters, with one demonstrator’s hand blown off by a police crowd-control grenade.
“On Saturday, in some major cities, you couldn’t look shopkeepers in the eye after hundreds of shops had been looted and tell them we hadn’t lost control,” Nunez said.
Nunez acknowledged a “lack of anticipation” in the deployment of security forces on Saturday, whose numbers were insufficient to deal with the large crowds of rioters and looters on the fringes of the demonstrations.
He estimated that some 60,000 law enforcement personnel had been deployed across the country that day.
“Given the damage that has been caused, it was only right that I should hand in my resignation,” Nunez said.
The presidency said in a statement that Macron had rejected the resignation, however, citing “the necessity for continued leadership of law enforcement”.
Instead, Macron ordered Nunez to “take all necessary steps to ensure transparency over the failures in planning and intelligence that led to the violence”.
To end the “barricades and looting, he also requested that the interior minister promptly implement new operational methods for security forces to use on the ground in combating rioters,” the statement added.
Looting continued on Sunday, with Paris Mayor Emmanuel Gregoire saying Monday that around 30 shops had been targeted in the capital the previous day, describing the scenes as “unbearable”.
Nunez said some 350 people had been arrested in Paris on Sunday and overnight.
Nationwide, more than 2,330 people were taken into police custody over the weekend, 70 percent of whom were adults, Justice Minister Gerald Darmanin said Monday.
More than 2,000 shops were expected to have been affected by the weekend’s violence across France, with damage running into “hundreds of millions of euros”, according to chamber of commerce president Alain Di Crescenzo.
In an address to the nation Sunday evening, Macron slammed the “unbridled” violence and said local authorities would be able to ban — “if necessary” — certain rallies in coming days.
But he stopped short of announcing drastic measures, such as a state of emergency or curfew.
Saturday’s protests followed four weeks of high school student protests that at times also turned violent.