After seven days of riots following the death of young Nahel on Tuesday in Nanterre, the calm seems to be confirmed.
After seven nights of tension following the death of Nahel, this 17-year-old killed by police fire on Tuesday during a check in Nanterre, the lull is confirmed on Tuesday July 4. The priority displayed by the president in recent days was simple: the return to order.
>> Death of Nahel: the violence decreased significantly overnight from Monday to Tuesday with 72 arrests
Facing the cameras first, Emmanuel Macron wanted to convey the image of a president who is in control of events: a martial tone and the staging of a succession of crisis meetings at the Élysée. And then on the ground, 45,000 police and gendarmes deployed several days in a row, again on Monday evening to keep up the pressure. For the moment, it is clear that a lull is emerging, and that recourse to the state of emergency, an admission of failure as confided by a minister, has, at this stage, been avoided.
But this crisis also reveals deeper questions on which the president is still expected. There are at least two missed meetings with the youth of the suburbs, first, to whom the president had promised to fight against house arrest, he who had announced his candidacy from Bobigny, in Seine-Saint-Denis, in 2016. But the suburban plan never saw the light of day. And these young people who are in the street today, they are children from the Macron school, from the Blanquer school, the former minister who wanted to restore authority in schools… As for the Minister of Education ‘Current education, Pap Ndiaye, it is inaudible. He was even disconnected from a set on France Inter on Sunday. Education cannot even be embodied in a crisis that concerns young people, which is to say the discredit of a minister who could also have been on the front line today.
Despite the fractures, order prevails
Another missed appointment for the president, the relationship between the police and the population. Emmanuel Macron had however appointed in 2018 his left arm in Beauvau, Christophe Castaner, the man who had announced the abandonment of the choke key. A few months later, in an interview with the Brut media, the president even ended up admitting “police brutality”. What has happened since? If Gérald Darmanin has succeeded in reconciling the executive with the police, the relationship between the police and young people in the neighborhoods is still just as conflicting and the dramas, on both sides, have been linked. But when the crises multiply: yellow vests, retirements, riots, with always the forces of order in the front line, the fundamental question collides against the urgency, yesterday as today: that the police hold, and that order is maintained.