Violent protests, so the complacent conventional wisdom goes, are a venerable French tradition. With notable exceptions, they change little of real consequence, other than acting as a permanent reminder to French governments that there may be a price to be paid in the streets for doing the right thing — a recipe for stagnation that is a matter of considerable consequence.
France’s latest round of rioting, nominally a protest about underfunded schools, is proving to be unusually violent as well as perversely destructive. Burning down or attacking schools is an unorthodox way of improving them. And there are legitimate fears that the disorder, which is being encouraged, at least to some degree, by leftist agitators who have long since left the classroom, may spread further still. There is speculation that this may even be a dress rehearsal for massive disturbances should Marine Le Pen’s populist-right RN win next year’s presidential elections.
France’s presidential elections are a two-round contest, a structure that winnows out wilder candidates and typically ensures that the eventual victor will be a candidate, whether from left or right, sympathetic to “republican values.” This system had been crumbling for a while, in no small part because of the supposedly centrist policies (on, for example, immigration or the euro) pursued by France’s establishment parties. It went through a near-death experience at the hands of current President Emmanuel Macron, an insider who won election as an outsider in 2017 and then did immense damage to what remained of the old party structure.
Meanwhile, mass immigration continued, and, as has been made evident yet again by the current rioting, assimilation has proved incomplete, a failure that now stretches across several generations. As a result, the RN (previously the National Front) has long since emerged from the fringe. These riots will do the RN no harm. On the far left, a relative newcomer, the far-left LFI under Jean-Luc Mélenchon, celebrates the “creolization” of France and is appealing to younger voters, immigrants, and their descendants, as well as to Islamists as co-belligerents, a strategy that the left is using elsewhere in Europe. The role played by some in the LFI, tacit or otherwise, in encouraging violence presumably rests on their understanding that for the right audience, violence makes an excellent recruiting sergeant. Moreover, were it to lead to a response by the authorities that could be characterized as an overreaction or that generates a martyr or two, so much the better.
Adding to the mess are rumblings of unease in the financial markets. France’s debt-to-GDP ratio now stands at 120 percent of GDP, its deficit at about 5.4 percent. French ten-year bond yields are now close to 24-year highs, increasing the country’s budget woes even as the government struggles to cut spending. If necessary, the European Central Bank can intervene to try to tamp down panic, but that’s a remedy that stores up problems for another day, not that Paris would be likely to worry too much about that.
For now, however, the government needs to restore order — and soon — if the rioting is not to spread further. Thereafter, it will doubtless be focused on the budget and trying to avoid next year’s runoff being between Mélenchon and Le Pen, two tricky problems. As to the first, giving the can another kick down the road looks like a good bet. So far as the second is concerned, a recent speech by one presidential hopeful, former Prime Minister Gabriel Attal, in which he called for yet more EU integration merely adds to already overwhelming evidence that France and indeed Europe’s radicalized “centrists” remain incapable of addressing the scale of the disaster they have done so much to create.