by MATHIEU DEJEAN & CHRISTOPHE GUEGNEAU (trans. David Broder)
France’s left has often failed to speak up for marginalized minorities. But after the backlash over the police murder of 17-year-old Nahel, left-wing parties have taken a clear stance, refusing to condemn rioters and insisting their anger is justified.
Still out of breath after the marche blanche in Nanterre — a solemn procession in tribute to Nahel, the seventeen-year-old shot dead by French police in this suburb west of Paris on Tuesday — La France Insoumise (LFI) MP for Seine-Saint-Denis Éric Coquerel is adamant: “This march was historic: at last, the left-wing activist community was there! Bit by bit, something has happened.” For this historic pillar of LFI, a tireless supporter of social struggles and working-class and marginalized neighborhoods, the parties of the Left have responded to the current riots in a totally different key to their stance toward the riots that broke out in 2005.
Back then, when the banlieues were set ablaze by the deaths of Zyed Benna and Bouna Traoré as they fled from the police, the political class was at best indifferent, at worst totally surpassed by events. While then interior minister Nicolas Sarkozy fanned the flames of youth hatred with talk of “blasting the streets clean,” “scum,” and “zero tolerance,” the Socialist Party (PS) aligned itself with the government’s positions: the priority was the unity of the Republic’s main political forces (it only abstained from voting on the state of emergency).
Even the far left felt “little invested in cars being torched,” sociologist Michel Kokoreff, professor at University of Paris 8 and author of La Diagonale de la rage, told Mediapart. In a 2007 study sociologist Véronique Le Goaziou wrote that the far left had “been conspicuous by its absence during a large part of the riots.” She noted the “silence of far-left groups,” but also “the embarrassment, even cacophony of the governing left (Socialist and Communist Parties),” which had “left the rioters deeply isolated politically.”
2005: Deafening Silence
In 2005, the France 2 news first talked about the scandal of the burned-out cars, then the death of the children, and the political reactions were all aligned with this hierarchy of information. There was a consensus in the call for calm, which left these children absolutely alone,” recalls anthropologist Alain Bertho, a specialist in the phenomenon of riots. “The prevailing idea was ‘working classes, dangerous classes’: we had such an outsider’s view that we didn’t understand,” agrees Coquerel.
Nearly twenty years on, something may well have changed. If the left-wing parties are still dizzy from the expression of popular anger over the last three nights, they are now sharing their amazement with understanding.
Jean-Luc Mélenchon, Marine Tondelier (head of the green party called Europe Écologie–Les Verts), and Olivier Faure (secretary of the Socialist Party) are calling for the anger to be listened to, even if they don’t say it in the same way. “There are many issues, the police-population relationship has deteriorated too much, the economic and social situation is very particular: all of this has become explosive, and that’s what’s being expressed today. I don’t see any message we can send that will calm things down,” says Faure.
Despite the avalanche of accusations of “anti-cop” hatred from the Right and far right, and Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin’s haughty calls for “the professionals of disorder” to “go home,” the left-wing parties’ condemnation of police violence is unanimous, and they are finally putting words to the causes of the anger being expressed.
After former prime minister Manuel Valls — still widely presented as a man of the Left (despite his record in office under President François Hollande in 2014–16 and later outspoken support for Macron) — criticized LFI for “blowing on the embers” with a view to “taking political advantage,” France Insoumise MP Alexis Corbière told Mediapart: “If you think people are going to burn down a police station because they read a tweet, that’s a conspiracy-theorist way of seeing things, which ignores the social reasons behind these conditions. People have lost their lives, and the way it’s been handled hasn’t given the families any confidence. The police force needs to be rebuilt, and its control body cannot depend on itself.”
At the Socialist Party, which as late as 2022 still rejected “the use of the terminology ‘police violence,’” its line is shifting — and it’s not giving an inch to accusations that this language is inflammatory. Emma Rafowicz, party spokeswoman and president of the Young Socialists, defends the use of these words: “It’s the reactions of the Right and far right, who only condemn the riots and judge that it’s too early to comment on Nahel’s death, that are fueling a huge wave of anger. We understand this anger, which is political. We’re a long way from peace and calm. We do need to find solutions to calm things down, but these reactions are the opposite,” she tells Mediapart.
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