The last months of Emmanuel Macron's mandate can seem very long: social unrest, violence in the street, the Government on a tightrope due to the lack of parliamentary consensus on the budget, rising risk premium due to debt and pressure from the markets. The icing on the cake would be the victory of Marine Le Pen in the presidential elections on May 2, 2027, a similar scenario - keeping in mind the distances - to the one that Barack Obama experienced when he had to hand over the key to the White House to Donald Trump in 2017. That nightmare so feared in the Elysée could come true.
Who benefits from riots like yesterday's, with 1,200 arrested and 150 police officers injured? In a first analysis, to the political extremes, without a doubt. Jean-Luc Mélenchon, leader of La Francia Insumisa (LFI, radical left) and candidate for the presidency of the Republic for the fourth time, smiled when he was interviewed on television while demonstrating. “Jean-Luc, president! Jean Luc, president!” shouted his supporters. And he accused the television networks of continuous information of exaggerating the riots, of showing too many images of the disorders when, in reality, the majority of marches, according to him, passed peacefully.
Also smiling, in the early morning, was the mayor of Saint-Denis, Bally Bagayoko, a co-religionist of Mélenchon and an emerging figure in his party, interviewed by the France Info station. LFI is, by far, the preferred party of young people and non-EU immigrants in the suburbs. This political formation systematically takes away the relevance of the riots and criminalizes the police.
The extreme right plays a similar game, but in the opposite direction. He admits the legitimacy of protesting the cost of living, since the bulk of his voters are lower middle class and suffer from the high price of fuel, although he attributes the violence to the strategy of the extreme left. “Legitimate social demands have once again been hijacked by the extreme left and the speeches of Jean-Luc Mélenchon's deputies, who, by legitimizing violence, considering order as oppression and disorder as a right, seek to plunge the country into chaos,” wrote the presidential candidate of the National Rally on her X account.
If the riots continue - the yellow vest phenomenon lasted more than a year, with protests every Saturday, and only stopped when the covid pandemic arrived - both the extreme left and the extreme right will try to take advantage. Mélenchon will say that his program of radical changes in the economic and social system is more urgent than ever, that much higher taxation is needed for the “super-rich” and perhaps eliminate part of the debt at a stroke in order to spend much more in the social sphere. Le Pen will maintain, for her part, that only she will be capable of restoring the authority that the country has needed for so many years and imposing order, a message that may resonate among right-wing voters who are still hesitant to take the step of voting for her in the second round.
Yesterday's riots are similar to those of the worst days of the yellow vests and have parallels with those that occurred after the death of Nahel Merzouk, a 17-year-old teenager, by police shooting, in Nanterre, a suburb of Paris, in the summer of 2023. Also then there were many looting actions and attacks on public buildings.
The cumulative effect of all these events fuels the speeches of both Mélenchon and Le Pen, who not in vain lead the polls of the first round of the presidential elections. Moderate political leaders associated with the Macron era, such as former prime ministers Édouard Philippe and Gabriel Attal, who are running for the Elysée, are caught between the extremes and their speech is not very credible for many people.
