A weekend of protests in France that saw widespread violence, destruction and looting has made next April’s presidential election even more consequential than it already was.
What started off as student demonstrations over poor school conditions has spiralled into a mass protest movement driven by anger at the cost of living and the state of public services.
Emmanuel Macron refused to accept the resignation of his interior minister over the weekend. The president also used a televised address on Sunday to call for national unity and sought to reassure the public that the perpetrators of the violence would be punished.
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“The French passion for protest is legendary in Europe,” said Katya Adler, the BBC’s Europe editor. But six months out from an “already fraught” election, these demonstrations are becoming highly politicised, with the hard left, under presidential hopeful Jean-Luc Mélenchon, accused of “weaponising student frustration” and the far-right, under Marine Le Pen, using footage of the violence to pitch herself as the candidate of a calm and peaceful France.
PM Sébastien Lecornu has made little secret of who he believes is to blame for the protests, accusing members of Mélenchon’s La France Insoumise of “instrumentalising the high school movement for their electoral advantage”, then going through the motions of condemning any violence.
The 75-year-old left-wing firebrand joined Saturday’s protests in which half a million people took to the streets in Paris, but has said accusations that he was responsible for the mayhem were aimed at weakening his presidential bid.
He is in a close race with centre-left candidate Raphaël Glucksmann and Edouard Philippe, from the centre-right, to see who will go up against Le Pen in a two-way run-off for the presidency next April.
Mélenchon is a veteran politician who “appeals to young people and heads an insurgent party built on grass-roots protest”, so the student-led demonstrations that have swept the country in recent weeks are “a golden opportunity” for him, said Mark Landler in The New York Times. But images of riot police, tear gas and streets in flames also carry “acute risks for a politician seeking mainstream acceptance”.
The violence on the margins of what were mostly “massive, peaceful demonstrations” is “potentially ruinous” for Mélenchon, said Peter McPhee, a history professor at the University of Melbourne, in The Conversation.
By contrast, it has been an “early Christmas present” for Le Pen, who has promised to “reimpose discipline in schools, increase funding for police” and target the instigators of the violence and looting as “obviously” illegal migrants to be deported.
“I see only one beneficiary and that’s Le Pen,” Paul Smith, from the University of Nottingham, told Al Jazeera. But Emile Chabal, from the University of Edinburgh, cautioned against automatically assuming a far-right gain, with “fear of disorder” historically benefiting conservative or centrist parties in France.
What next?
With six months left in office and unable to run for a third term, Macron is already seen as head of “pretty much a lame duck government”, said Alistair Bunkall on Sky News. Now his authority seems to be “ebbing away” even more.
“The TV pictures of the past few weeks will hardly inspire confidence,” said the broadcaster. There are “red warning signs” flashing for France’s economy and “a failure by the minority French government to secure a budget deal would be the next big tipping point”.
It is still too early to tell how this will play out at the polls next year. As Jérôme Rodrigues, a prominent activist from the 2018 gilets jaunes protests, said: “Anger has no political party. An empty fridge has no political party.”
