Leftist riots have resulted in damaged buildings and widespread chaos in France.
Authorities had “lost control” in major cities, Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez said, according to NBC News.
Protests drawing crowds topping half a million people have damaged historic buildings, such as the 19th-century town hall in Limoges, and forced the Louvre to close after access was blocked by protesters.
“Despite scenes of severe violence and extensive property damage, no one was killed and that is a miracle,” Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu said, noting about 3,000 businesses had been damaged.
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More than 2,400 people have been arrested, while about 1,000 police officers have been injured.
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Jordan Bardella, the president of the far-right National Rally party, said that “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,” according to The New York Times.
“People need to wake up now,” Bardella said. “They need to make the right political choices, and in any case, we stand ready to restore order in the country.”
As noted by NBC News, the violence erupted after days of anti-government protests over failing schools and rising costs of living.
French President Emmanuel Macron blamed “troublemakers from far-left fringe groups.”
“Watching these images, we all wondered how French people could do this to France,” he remarked in a televised address Sunday. “Nothing justifies it, nothing explains it, nothing excuses it.”
Macron added that “those who sought to bring down the Republic will be held accountable.”
Macron “looks like a spectator,” Sylvain Brouard, research director of Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques at Sciences Po in Paris, told NBC News.
“It doesn’t look like he was in control of anything,” he said, noting that the French people expect “solutions.”
Macron added to the anger by attending a concert on Friday and then heading off to the Middle East.
“That’s probably a source of anger for many of the people that were claiming their frustrations and their deprivations and the need for more money for the higher cost of living,” Brouard said.
This article originally appeared on The Western Journal and is reposted with permission.
