France’s prime minister has said he has asked regional authorities to impose partial curfews in some cities after the government admitted police had “lost control” in several places during violent weekend protests around the country. Sébastien Lecornu said after an emergency cabinet meeting on Monday he was “fully resolved to restore public order” and had called for “local and partial” curfews if needed. There was “no question” of imposing a full curfew on entire cities such as Paris, he added.
Lecornu told reporters that if declaring a state of emergency was deemed necessary “we could do so”, but added that at this stage partial curfews seemed “more appropriate”. He did not say which cities, or what form the curfews would take. His comments came after France’s interior minister conceded police “lost control” in some cities during Saturday’s protests and the president, Emmanuel Macron, demanded a full security review and “new operational methods” to end the rioting.
Laurent Nuñez said on Monday there had been a “lack of anticipation” in preparations for the protests and acknowledged that police numbers had sometimes been inadequate to deal with rioters and looters on the fringes of the demonstrations. Nuñez said intelligence had suggested there would be 200,000 demonstrators around the country. In the event, there were more than 500,000 and peaceful protests were hijacked, morphing into one of France’s most violent days of unrest in recent years.
He said he had tendered his resignation to Macron because he felt “responsible for everything that happened”. Macron refused it, demanding instead that Nuñez “take all necessary steps to ensure transparency over planning and intelligence failures”. The protests follow weeks of demonstrations by high school students that have been marred by sometimes violent clashes with police, rocking the country six months before a crunch presidential election and amid mounting economic pressures.
Public buildings including a town hall were attacked and set ablaze and an estimated 2,000 shops were ransacked and looted, authorities have said. Nearly 2,400 people – 70% of them adults – were arrested and almost 1,000 police and gendarmes injured. Nuñez said 60,000 police and other security forces had been deployed around the country, but acknowledged it had not been enough to control determined, organised groups of violent rioters in major cities including Paris, Marseille and Lyon.
The justice minister, Gérald Darmanin, also said intelligence failings had left the state vulnerable. Macron’s office said in a statement on Monday that besides reviewing the security shortcomings, Nuñez had been tasked with “promptly implementing new operational methods for security forces to use on the ground in combating rioters”. Rioting and looting continued on Sunday.
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