French Prime Minister Sebastien Lecornu called for localised curfews on Monday, as protesters blocked the entrance to the Louvre in Paris and authorities scrambled to stem public discontent that over the weekend saw mass cost-of-living demonstrations spill over into some of the worst street violence in recent years.
Lecornu huddled with ministers in a crisis meeting after the interior minister said the police “had lost control” during the weekend’s unrest.
With the Yellow Vests movement, which organised the weekend’s rallies, calling for a new round of protests next Saturday, Lecornu called for regional authorities to impose “partial” and “localised” curfews to protect businesses after hundreds of shops were damaged and looted.
“I’m absolutely determined to restore public order,” he vowed, adding that the government was ready to impose a state of emergency “if needed”.
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.
French President Emmanuel Macron also refused Interior Minister Laurent Nunez’s resignation even as he acknowledged security and intelligence failures in the government response.
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 per cent of whom were adults — and many of whom were already known to authorities, Justice Minister Gerald Darmanin said on 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 on Sunday, Macron slammed the “unbridled” violence and said local authorities would be able to ban some rallies, but stopped short of imposing more drastic measures.
City authorities in Marseille said on Monday they had banned public gatherings from noon to 08:00 pm (1000-1800 GMT).
The European Union slammed the weekend violence as “unacceptable” but warned that the right to peaceful protest “must be protected” in France.
Germany condemned the violence and updated its travel advice for France, saying “further demonstrations and, in some cases, further outbreaks of violence in the coming days cannot be ruled out”.
The United Kingdom said the right to protest “can never excuse violence”.
Louvre blocked
Public discontent showed no signs of subsiding on Monday, with demonstrators blocking the entrance to Paris’s iconic Louvre Museum, the most visited in the world.
Rising prices have fuelled anger in France, where diesel prices have jumped nearly 40pc and petrol by 25pc since March, and where food prices have risen by 25pc since 2021.
The unrest has flared just months before a key presidential election where centrist Macron cannot stand again and Marine Le Pen, the far-right presidential candidate for the National Rally party, is riding high in the polls.
Ministers and Le Pen have accused ultra-left groups of stoking the violence to boost the chances of the far-left firebrand Jean-Luc Melenchon in the presidential polls.
On Monday, Lecornu blamed the “ultra-left movement” for seeking to “orchestrate deep unrest across the country”.
“There is a whole network that could be mobilised to even call into question the timetable for the presidential election and the holding of the presidential election itself,” Lecornu told reporters.
Europe
Similar demonstrations have broken out in other countries.
During the weekend, clashes broke out on the sidelines of a cost-of-living demonstration in Milan, with Mayor Giuseppe Sala warning: “I’m very worried because it’s a new phenomenon, which also originates from an international scenario and therefore feeds itself.”
In Belgium, police fired tear gas and water cannons to disperse protesters in Brussels and Liege.
In Spain, hundreds of tents have occupied Madrid’s central Puerta del Sol square since September, when the eviction of an 87-year-old woman from her lifelong flat sparked nationwide protests in a country with soaring housing costs.
Protesters have also set up tents in Portugal’s main cities of Lisbon and Porto over rising costs of housing.