◎ Xina
A 140-year-old city hall in Limoges, France, was recently set on fire and the building was almost completely destroyed. (AFP)
The flames on the streets of France started from the legitimate anger of high school students against dilapidated school buildings and teacher shortages. In just a few weeks, the "Teachers and Classrooms" protests were hijacked by extremist forces and external forces and turned into nationwide riots. What Taiwan should take a closer look at is how this fire is ignited and how it is fueled.
One method is to use political forces to seize demands
According to an assessment by French intelligence agencies on October 1, the movement was not purely spontaneous, but was behind the operations of the far-left political party "Informed France" and its peripheral organizations. Members of the party appeared in high schools to support the blockade when the protests first started in mid-September. The party leader publicly endorsed and criticized the police. The French prime minister and president named "extreme left-wing factions and criminals" in an attempt to create chaos before the 2027 election.
Melanchon, the leader of the radical left-wing force "France Unyielding" in the left-wing alliance. (AFP)
The second method is violence parasitizing peace
During the nationwide march on October 17, most people rationally expressed their dissatisfaction with the cost of living and education. However, masked men in black clung to the edges of the parade, setting fires, attacking police officers, looting shops, burning down the 143-year-old city hall in Limoges, and breaking into the Marseille city hall. There are three types of people mixed in the campus blockade scene: initiators of demands, students who follow suit, and troublemakers outside the school. When violence becomes the protagonist of the picture, the original appeal is swallowed up, and social sympathy is reversed.
The third method is to amplify the cracks by external forces
The pro-communist media quickly packaged the chaos into a global struggle against Macron and capitalism. Iran was named by French officials for information operations, and Russian official media advocated "Europe's suicidal decline." These forces work their way into gaps with precision, deepening antagonism and distrust.
French President Macron is facing a double attack from the student movement and people's anger over inflation, which has become a severe test for him before leaving office. (AP)
The three merged, and the legitimate demands for people's livelihood changed from "solving problems" to "creating divisions." When society is divided into students versus police, leftists versus government, suburbs versus cities, the whole country will always suffer.
Taiwan is no stranger to this script. From recall cases to local elections, the CCP has long used agents, cyber armies, financial flows, and disinformation to amplify blue-green opposition, generational conflicts, wealth gaps, and ethnic issues, packaging "people's dissatisfaction" as "system failure," allowing the most extreme voices to dominate public opinion and eroding people's trust in democracy. The 9-in-1 election is approaching, and we must be highly vigilant against any operation that leads the legitimate demands of students, youth, and workers to violence, confrontation, and anti-system.
At the same time, Taiwan must build a strong defense line. Protecting freedom of speech and assembly is the bottom line of democracy; severely punishing violence and infiltration in accordance with the law is democratic self-defense; actively listening to young people and grassroots, and responding to the plight of education, housing, and employment with specific policies is to take away the firewood in the hands of divisive people. What authoritarian systems fear most is mutual trust among democratic countries, because once the cracks are filled by policies and systems, external forces will be unable to take action.
The warning from the French riots to Taiwan is that we must build a strong line of defense: guard freedom of speech and assembly, severely punish violence and infiltration in accordance with the law, and actively listen to young people and grassroots, and respond to people's livelihood issues with specific policies; diagram. (European News Agency)
The fire in France is burning, and Beijing can also understand this script. Democracy will not collapse overnight, but will be slowly hollowed out by legitimate anger that is hijacked again and again. To keep the people's trust is to keep Taiwan.
(The author is a foreign business)
