Macron needs to get a grip on police brutality and social exclusion

Editorial: With French police unions almost literally pouring petrol on the flames by describing rioters as ‘vermin’ and ‘savage hordes’, the president must act urgently to prevent his society imploding

The threat of full-blown xenophobia taking over French politics is more real now than it has ever been (AFP via Getty)

The Independent would not dream of lecturing the French on their affairs, but as neighbours we would observe: Paris, we have a problem. The situation in France seems to be more serious than other recent disturbances, such as this year’s protests against pensions reform and the gilets jaunes riots of five years ago.

Indeed, the current wave of unrest is more like, and potentially more serious than, the three weeks of rioting that followed the electrocution of two teenagers who hid in an electricity substation to escape from the police in 2005.

This time, the French police seem more at fault – or, at least, the officer who shot and killed Nahel, the 17-year-old, seems to have no defence for his action. In contrast, the response of Emmanuel Macron, the French president, seems to have been more responsible than that of Nicolas Sarkozy, the interior minister 18 years ago. President Macron called the shooting “inexplicable and inexcusable”, whereas Mr Sarkozy called the dead teenagers thieves and stoked tensions in 2005.

The tragedy on both occasions is that the rioters are mostly damaging their own neighbourhoods, setting fire to the shops their families use and destroying the trams and buses their communities rely on. As the France football team, most of whose members were born in the same banlieues, put it in an appeal for calm on Friday, the rioters are engaged in a “veritable process of auto-destruction”.

Moral outrage at what appears to be a clear case of police violence – the officer who shot Nahel has been charged with manslaughter – has triggered pent-up grievances against police brutality in the multiracial housing estates in France’s big cities. Inevitably, it has been mixed with criminal looting, and with the incoherent revolutionary politics of small groups, but the underlying resentments are justified.

As if to prove the point, the French police unions managed to pour petrol almost literally on the flames by issuing a statement on Friday describing the rioters as “vermin” (nuisibles) and “savage hordes”, and warning that the country was in the middle of a civil war.

If we British think our police have problems with racist attitudes in the ranks, the situation in France is worse. The problem of social cohesion is worse too, in that the large populations of French citizens of north African origin tend to be concentrated in the big cities where they experience the police almost as an occupying force. President Macron may have reacted appropriately at the start but he needs to launch an urgent programme of police reform and social measures.

Other political voices in France are more sinister. Jean-Luc Melenchon, the leading candidate of the so-called left in last year’s presidential election, has refused to appeal for “calm” and seems almost to approve of the violence. Eric Zemmour has repeated his racist message that second and third-generation immigrants are not really French and that this is a revolt by “foreigners”. Fortunately, he has little purchase, and Marine Le Pen, the mainstream candidate of the anti-immigration right, continues her quest for respectability by maintaining moderate language.

But the threat of full-blown xenophobia taking over French politics is more real now than it has ever been. The next presidential election is not for another four years, so in that time President Macron must get a grip on police brutality and the feeling in the banlieues that they are second-class citizens in their own country. There is no time to waste.