Interior Minister Laurent Nunez pointed on Monday to a development in France’s protests that worries officials as much as the size of the crowds. Organised far right gangs confronted far left activists in several cities during Saturday’s demonstrations, he said, arriving in organised formations in places such as Nice and Montpellier, officially to defend businesses but mainly, in his account, to target the ultra left movement. That is a second conflict layered onto the first, between protesters and police, and it changes the policing problem from crowd control to keeping rival street movements apart.
What Nunez said happened
Nunez said the interior ministry had known there were calls from numerous identity based and nationalist movements to come out, officially to defend businesses. In a number of cities, he said, these groups arrived in organised formations, mainly to target the ultra left movement. The interior ministry deployed 70,000 police for Saturday’s demonstrations, which unions called to denounce the high cost of living and public services, and Nunez said the huge police presence prevented a repeat of the violence seen nine days earlier, when unrest engulfed dozens of cities. Police arrested 1,435 people nationwide during Saturday’s demonstrations, a figure that captures both the scale of mobilisation and the scale of the response, but arrests alone do not describe the street faction problem, because the factions are not protesting the government so much as each other.
Why October 31 is the test
Nunez said authorities expect further disturbances during demonstrations planned for October 31, telling BFM TV that Halloween evening is traditionally always a bit lively and that officials expect it to be complicated again. If rival factions return to the streets on the same night as protesters, police will face three groups with different aims at once, and the risk is that a protest about living costs becomes a stage for street confrontations that have little to do with prices or services. The government has shown it can deploy enough police to contain a Saturday. The question for October 31 is whether it can deploy them cleverly enough to separate movements that are looking for each other, because a night in which factions find each other will be remembered very differently from a night in which they merely marched past each other.
