France’s government is preparing to ban protests it calls illegitimate after the worst urban violence in years, and President Emmanuel Macron says anyone planning to cause disorder this Saturday will be stopped. He told reporters on Thursday that “seditious” ultra-left groups and vandals were behind the riots and looting on Oct. 17, as police and officials across the country got ready for another tense weekend.
The Oct. 17 unrest broke out on the edges of nationwide demonstrations over living costs. It shocked the country with its scale and with how long police needed to bring it under control.
What Macron has announced
Macron planned to meet intelligence officials and senior ministers on Thursday to get a full account of what happened. His government has already put troops on the streets of Paris, set curfews in parts of the capital and other cities, and admitted failures in how it handled the weekend. The hard-left party France Unbowed denies ministers’ claims that it fueled the unrest, and it has criticized the troop deployment. One party figure said demonstrators are not “enemies within.”
The city of Orleans is bracing for trouble this weekend because the far-right National Rally holds its annual meeting there, and unions and left-wing groups plan to march at the same time.
A fight over what the riots mean
On Wednesday, during a trip to Qatar to look for energy deals, Macron lashed out at foreign leaders who commented on the riots. He called their remarks unacceptable and stupid and said some of the comments rested on false information. Asked whether he meant President Donald Trump, he answered that Trump was one of several. Macron said France saw no visible foreign interference in the riots themselves, but he said there was foreign manipulation of information afterward, including AI-generated images of scenes that never happened and false claims that migrants had taken over the country, France 24 reported. He suggested Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who both face elections soon, were using France to score political points.
Trump and Republican leaders have in fact pointed to the French unrest as a warning to U.S. voters, which we covered in our report on Trump’s France warning and his $400 million spending pledge.
The money and the politics
Analysts say the unrest has raised worries about France’s strained public finances, and the country’s borrowing costs have risen as investors reacted. The protests grew out of anger over high energy prices, tight household budgets and weakening public services. The backlash is already shaping next year’s presidential race, where far-right and hard-left candidates are polling strongly.
Union leaders say the government has not responded to their demands. Sophie Binet, who leads the left-wing CGT union, said her group’s concerns had received no consideration at all.
Officials have not said how many events they will ban this weekend or what penalties organizers could face.
