AP (“From France to Albania, social unrest is setting Europe’s streets ablaze“):
Rising fuel costs, discontent with the state of schools, declining public services and a housing crisis are fueling an autumn of protests in Europe.
Crowds have protested for weeks in major cities, with some demonstrations marked by arrests, looting, injuries and violence across France, Italy and Albania. In Spain and Portugal, tent camps have sprung up to protest unaffordable housing.
Young Europeans are experiencing “a strong sense of uncertainty and a lack of control,” said María Silvestre, professor of sociology at the University of Deusto in Spain. “And when specific situations come together, a spark suddenly ignites that is capable of channeling that discontent and driving people into the streets.”
Cities have turned into battlefields as top EU economies, including France, Italy and Spain, approach pivotal elections, while far-right parties have made electoral gains in Germany and could do so elsewhere. It also comes as Europe faces a critical moment in its support for Ukraine, with President Donald Trump making overtures to President Vladimir Putin even as Russia is blamed for increasingly frequent arson attacks, cyberattacks and other acts of sabotage in NATO countries.
Right-wing politicians have seized on the chaos. While protests in France have appeared broad-based, Trump portrayed immigrants as responsible for the destruction, writing Monday on his Truth Social platform: “The migrants have taken over France. They must CLOSE THE BORDERS, FAST!”
Many of the protests have been fueled by frustrated young people. Other actors, including black-clad, masked agitators, have fomented violence, but French authorities and police have not blamed immigrants.
NYT (“Huge Riots and Antigovernment Protests in France: What to Know“):
France is moving to reassert order after antigovernment demonstrations devolved into the most destructive riots in decades over the weekend, causing widespread damage and deepening a sense of national reckoning.
Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu said on Tuesday that he would extend for another night the localized curfews that his government imposed a day earlier. Mr. Lecornu said those curfews had “helped keep the night calm” on Monday.
The move came amid a political blame game over who was ultimately responsible for the chaos.
The protests have heightened a sense of fiscal and social crisis in France, the European Union’s second-largest economy. And there’s more debate to come: The government is trying to pass an unpopular belt-tightening budget before a presidential election in the spring.
[…]
On Monday, high-level officials admitted failure.
Laurent Nuñez, the interior minister, offered something of an apology on national radio, saying that the police had been underprepared to deal with the scale of the riots that spun off from the mostly peaceful protests in the country.
He said he had offered his resignation to Mr. Macron but that it had not been accepted.
Mr. Darmanin, the justice minister, also acknowledged that the authorities had “undeniably failed” in the face of the violence.
Mr. Lecornu, the prime minister, struck a different tone, saying that the French police had done a good job against a “shadowy network” of instigators who he said were seeking to orchestrate “profound disorder” before the elections in April. He blamed the far left for the unrest, as have some far-right leaders and the centrist government.
They have pointed in particular to France Unbowed, a major far-left party. France Unbowed has rejected the accusation, and its leader, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, has blamed the government for actions that he said had made the unrest more likely.
Mr. Mélenchon said on social media that Mr. Lecornu was “responsible for the chaos” because of “incompetence or a worst-case strategy to create a party of order that would make people forget his failure in public finances.”
Catherine Porter, NYT (“France’s Far Right Seizes the Moment as Rioting Stuns the Country“):
After riots erupted this weekend in cities across France, its centrist government blamed the main far-left party, accusing its politicians of inciting the violence. That party blamed the government, accusing it of stirring public anger through years of bad governance and heavy-handed policing.
What did the main far-right party do? It blamed both, and launched into campaign mode.
“We are paying for decades of being soft on crime, of weak authority, of the moral, psychological, and material disarmament of our internal security forces,” Jordan Bardella, the president of the far-right National Rally party, said after emerging from a police station in central Paris on Sunday. He said had gone there to support police officers.
Then he addressed France’s “honest citizens” who were stunned on Sunday by the smashed storefronts and burned-out businesses destroyed by rioters the night before. He said they had a vital role to play in reinstating national stability. And that would be by voting in the coming election for his party.
“People need to wake up now,” Mr. Bardella said. “They need to make the right political choices, and in any case, we stand ready to restore order in the country.”
I can not think of a single case when electing a far-right government didn’t work out.
While immigration is a longstanding target of right-wing populists, with the exception of Italy, none of these countries experienced a significant influx of refugees from the Syrian civil war. France, of course, has long had a large population of migrants from the Middle East and North Africa, resulting from its colonial policies.
The protests continue to baffle me. All of these countries have considerably more generous social welfare programs—from health care to education subsidies to unemployment benefits to childcare support to retirement pensions—than the United States. Most of them have more representative political systems, allowing niche parties to gain representation in the legislature. The justification for rioting in the streets is hard to fathom.
