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After the
violence and chaos in France, there’s only one beneficiary: Marine Le Pen
The
far-right leader’s promise to restore order will appeal to many ahead of next
year’s presidential elections – the stakes are suddenly much higher
Tue 20
Oct 2026 11.59 CEST
There is
only one clear winner so far from France’s chaos: Marine Le Pen. The violence
and rioting that engulfed towns and cities across the country over the
weekend, six months before a pivotal presidential election, is a godsend for
the hard-right, Eurosceptical, anti-immigration candidate. As buildings
burned, shops were looted and police attacked, the rioting largely drowned
out peaceful mass protests over the dilapidated state of schools , fuel prices
and the cost of living.
Across
France and the rest of Europe, people are in shock at scenes
of arson and pillage in city centres, the wrecking of symbols of the
republic such as the 19th-century town hall in peaceful provincial Limoges and
the bust of Marianne in Marseille’s city hall, and the looting of more than
2,000 shops.
Though
France has a long
revolutionary tradition, this was not the work of egalitarian insurgents or
working-class warriors, but nihilist, anarchist “black bloc” gangs, with
opportunist looters and rioters along for the ride.
Emmanuel
Macron is a lame-duck president who has no practical answers to a crisis that
is ruining his legacy. Macron expressed
his “anger and shame” at the violence and the damage to France’s global
image in a Sunday-night broadcast to the nation, but he is so widely loathed,
including by many who voted for him in two presidential elections, that his
pleas for order and dialogue were largely ignored.
Le Pen,
in contrast, issued a solemn
video message, looking presidential as she sat at a desk with the national
tricolor (but no EU flag) and bookshelves as her backdrop. Millions of
suffering French people were angry about “anarchic immigration” and the cost of
living without smashing or burning anything, she said. They would have an
opportunity in six months’ time to vote for a different path of “restored
authority and security”.
A
screengrab from Marine Le Pen’s video after the riots across France.
Photograph: Rassemblement National
Macron’s
minority government is trapped in a vicious circle. France’s debt and deficit
squeeze leaves him no spare cash left to buy off protesters. A decade of his
centre-right presidency has failed to reform a bloated public sector or improve
public services. The country has a youth crisis, characterised by anxiety over
an economically
uncertain future and amplified by social media, as well as a geopolitical
crisis with Russia’s war on Ukraine spreading into a covert
war against Europe.
Foreign
critics of progressive European social policies are fanning the flames with
incendiary commentaries. Donald Trump gloated
on social media that “France is burning!”. Blaming the situation on
immigration, he urged the French to “close your borders and take control before
it is too late”. Vladimir Putin’s close aide Kirill Dmitriev described events
in France as “the
suicidal fall of Europe” and also ascribed it in part to chaotic migration.
The
convergence of crises leaves little room for manoeuvre for a French government
struggling to push even a mildly cost-cutting budget through a hung parliament.
For now, it is trying to extinguish the violence with selective
curfews. One presidential hopeful, Dominique de Villepin, who was a
Gaullist prime minister 20 years ago, has even compared the situation to the
eve of the fall of the ancien regime in 1788, a year before the outbreak
of the Revolution, when France was stricken by drought, failed harvests and
empty state coffers.
That may
be a far-fetched parallel. But the sense of a fraying state, a discredited
political class and an ossified bureaucracy unable to staunch a slow-motion
financial crisis that might suddenly accelerate makes the stakes in next year’s
presidential race ever-higher.
Until
last weekend’s explosion, the school and student protests, unrest over the cost
of living and outrage at instances of police brutality against young
demonstrators all seemed to be lifting the campaign of radical-left firebrand
Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who in some opinion polls had overtaken
the centrist Edouard Philippe for second place. However, Mélenchon’s
apparent refusal to clearly condemn the looting or attacks on the police, and
his belittling
of the violence as “disorder that is part of the events in the life of a
society”, may cost him support among more moderate leftwing voters who have
boosted Socialist candidate Raphaël Glucksmann in the latest opinion surveys.
Investors
are taking
fright at the violence and political instability, selling French stocks and
bonds. A deepening market run on France could yet change the dynamics of the
presidential campaign, rallying a frightened middle-class behind a seasoned
centrist candidate seen as a safe pair of hands in a crisis.
A month
after the May 1968 student-worker uprising that rocked Charles de Gaulle’s
staid regime, voters scared by the spectre of civil unrest delivered a
landslide victory to his party, which promised to restore order and authority.
A year later, De Gaulle was disavowed in a referendum on regional devolution
and resigned.
Historical
comparisons are risky. Last weekend’s violence has increased the likelihood of
a law-and-order backlash among voters that could propel Le Pen into the Élysée
Palace. But if the financial situation worsens and the campaign turns on who
can save the economy, she may yet lose out to a candidate who is firm on
security and more orthodox on fiscal policy. Economics is Le Pen’s weak spot.
So far,
neither Philippe nor other centrist and centre-right rivals have set the
campaign alight. But six months is a long time in French politics.
- Paul Taylor is a senior visiting
fellow at the European Policy Centre
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