Emmanuel Macron meets ministers to thrash out response to unrest

Receive free French politics updates

We’ll send you a myFT Daily Digest email rounding up the latest French politics news every morning.

Emmanuel Macron and his top ministers met on Sunday evening to mobilise the government’s response towards unrest that has shaken France, after a fifth night of looting and rioting sparked by the fatal police shooting of a teenager.

After discussing the crisis with prime minister Élizabeth Borne, interior minister Gérald Darmanin and justice minister Éric Dupond-Moretti, the president called on them to “continue to do everything possible to reestablish order and restore calm”, said a person at the meeting.

Tensions abated slightly overnight into Sunday, according to the interior ministry. Arrests fell by about half to 719, and only 50 of the 45,000 police officers deployed across the country to quell rioting were injured, far fewer than in previous nights. 

But an attack overnight on the home of the mayor of the Parisian suburb of L’Haÿ-les-Roses, in which unidentified individuals set a car on fire and rammed it through the front gate while his family was sleeping inside, has made clear the danger of the unrest. No one was hurt, and police are looking for the attackers.

“A line was crossed,” Laurent Nuñez, Paris police prefect, said of the attack, speaking on BFM TV.

Borne, who visited the mayor of L’Haÿ-les-Roses with Darmanin to show their support, described the attacks on mayors as “intolerable”.

About 150 town halls or municipal buildings have been attacked across France in recent days, the president of the association of mayors told the AFP news agency. Parisian authorities were set to deploy 7,000 extra police officers in the capital on Sunday night.

However, the government said the violent scenes that erupted across towns and cities since Nahel, a 17-year-old of north African descent, was killed by police five days ago had calmed compared with previous days.

“Quieter night thanks to the resolute action of the police,” Darmanin wrote on Twitter on Sunday.

Central Paris was functioning normally on Sunday despite the unrest, although many events have been cancelled in recent days. Luxury group LVMH said it would call off a menswear show for its fashion brand Céline.

Some 719 arrests were made on Saturday night and Sunday morning compared with 1,311 on Friday, and the number of fires more than halved, according to the ministry.

Police reinforcements included units specialising in urban violence. Armoured vehicles were deployed in Marseille and Lyon, where looting in the city centres was particularly bad. Police also blocked off the Champs Élysées in Paris to try to prevent luxury shops from being ransacked.

Nahel, whose last name has not been made public, was shot and killed by police after being held at a traffic stop.

A private funeral for him took place on Saturday at a hilltop cemetery in Nanterre, where he lived, and a ceremony was held at a nearby mosque.

Nadia, the dead boy’s grandmother, on Sunday called for calm, telling BFM TV: “The people who are rioting, I’m telling them to stop.”

It is the third outbreak of violent protests Macron has faced since being elected president in 2017, after the gilets jaunes movement that began in 2018 over a proposed fuel tax and a series of protests this year over his unpopular pensions reform.

The president was forced to cancel a state visit to Germany to focus on his government’s response.

On Sunday, Macron sought to chart a political course out of the crisis by asking his prime minister to meet the heads of opposition parties and calling a listening session for 220 mayors of towns affected by the riots and looting. He also called for the start of “an in-depth examination to understand the reasons that led to these events”, said the person present.

The fatal shooting of Nahel has stoked a wave of anger that has exacerbated tensions between the police and young people throughout the country. The riots have particularly affected areas that are home to minorities and immigrants, who face racial profiling by police and discrimination in housing and job opportunities, according to official studies.

The outcry grew quickly after a video of the incident was shared on social media, showing no apparent immediate threat to the two officers who were trying to stop the teenager’s car. 

Preliminary charges of voluntary homicide have been filed against one of the officers involved and he is in pre-trial detention, a rare step in such cases in France.

In Nanterre, a demographically mixed area that includes the business district La Défense and large high-rises of social housing, ordinary life continued as residents went about their daily routines and dined on sunny café terraces.

“I support the family of Nahel but I am against the violence and breaking things,” said Yamid Bensoussan, a waiter at a local restaurant. “Most people here feel that way.”