French Cabinet Meets in Crisis as Parliament Demands an Inquiry
The prime minister holds an emergency cabinet meeting today after a weekend the BBC describes as some of the worst public disorder in modern French history. The president of the National Assembly wants a parliamentary inquiry into what happened and why. The interior minister has not resigned, despite calls from left and right.
The interior ministry’s count stands at about 2,400 arrested and close to a thousand police, gendarmes and firefighters injured, seven of them seriously; an earlier count of 1,800 and more than 500 was superseded during Sunday. An estimated 1,500 shops and businesses were looted or destroyed, though the interior minister puts the number with considerable damage at several hundred, and the mayor of Bordeaux says up to a hundred were looted in that city alone. One protester died of cardiac arrest during the Paris demonstrations, police said, without giving further detail. Emmanuel Macron’s address has been widely criticised for lacking concrete detail, and the curfew and state of emergency that had been rumoured did not materialise. Sophie Binet, who leads the CGT union, accused him of failing to address the cost of living, declining public services or the students’ original complaint. The thing to watch is not this week but the next: fresh mass demonstrations have already been called for a fortnight’s time.