Anarchy in France: Behind the riots and violent protests

Looting, rioting, and entire buildings going up in flames. These are the scenes that have poured out of France over the weekend, showing anarchy nationwide, leading to thousands of arrests. France has been hit with unprecedented riots over the weekend, as what started just over a month ago as a demonstration at a local school in Paris over staff shortages has spiraled into nationwide unrest. We've seen almost 2,500 arrests, thousands of stores looted, hundreds of cops injured, the destruction of main monuments including City Hall in the southern city of Limoges. Fox News Digital has an investigation out which alleges that some 54 various left-wing environmentalist, communist, socialist, even Islamist organizations have coordinated some of this unrest behind the scenes or have at least been involved in amplifying those voices. So who you blame for this unrest very much depends on which side of the political aisle you land. On the sort of far right, you have Marine Le Pen, who has branded the unrest as a threat to democracy and called French President Emmanuel Macron a leader without credibility or authority. On the other side, you have Jean-Luc Mélenchon of the sort of insurgent left. His party has been partly blamed for fanning this unrest, or at the very least not condemning it and not condemning the students. And so there is this sense that, as you've seen in a lot of other countries around Europe, the more sort of moderate parties of the center left or the center right are being squeezed out. And instead, you're seeing people on both sides flocking to the extremes. What's happening in France has to do with immigration, not schools, not anything. It's immigration. And I told President Macron, close up your borders. I told him the first time I met him, which was years ago in my first term, close up your borders you're gonna have nothing but trouble and they've got a lot of trouble so President Macron among others has uh blamed this unrest on migrant communities in France and there's certainly a sense that if you look at some of the footage of the unrest that is the perspective that the far right are using as kind of demonstrating this failed migration model in France but what seems to be the case is that it's it's gone far beyond that because we are seeing unrest not just in the more historically diverse suburbs of Paris or Marseille, but also in smaller cities, smaller towns, various different groups getting involved all with their own kind of agenda and grievance. And so whether that unrest is really as simple as being spearheaded by migrants, it seems too early to say at this point. As to what the goal of the protesters is in France, at this stage it remains somewhat unclear. As this investigation is found, there appear to be various different groups of various different causes and that seems to be the overriding perspective at the moment is that the current unrest in France is an excuse for whoever has a gripe with the current system to get their point out or at the very least to be public in the streets and to hijack the chaos for whatever agenda they have. So while some of the students may have had valid concerns in the beginning about staff shortages in schools or overcrowded classrooms crumbling facilities some of the scenes over the weekend definitely appear to have hardened the general public's view in France about the unrest. Scenes such as the looting of luxury stores, Apple stores, Louis Vuitton, Dior, local shopkeepers and ordinary French men and women being attacked by rioters have kind of turned and hardened that view against and again seems to have pushed French politics more to the extremes. Before the weekend mayhem, the unrest first erupted in France in late September. In recent years, an influx of students brought on by migration and a notable 2010 fertility spike, coupled with budget-saving policies, has left 70% of French public school classrooms with more than 30 pupils per class, while only 15% of all school buildings in the nation have been built or renovated in the last decade. Tensions eventually boiled over, and over weeks, hundreds of thousands of people protested poor conditions at French schools, snowballing into some of the most violent clashes that the country had seen in nearly 60 years, with riots disrupting cities and police making thousands of arrests. Over 450,000 protesters took to the streets on October 7th, resulting in at least 2,000 schools being blockaded or closed. The wild scenes quickly exploded into an international story and sparked a wave of student activism in other countries where students became inspired by what they saw. Major unrest also hit the Belgian city of Liège on October 7th and eventually to the capital of Brussels as hundreds of students took to the streets, shattering storefront windows and igniting fires over rising education costs and overcrowded classrooms. Several Belgian students told Reuters that they were in touch with their French counterparts. Clashes followed in Albania on October 13th, prompted by outrage over education coupled with accusations of corruption that led to violent protests in the capital demanding for the country's prime minister to resign. After weeks of ongoing protests in Spain over a housing crisis, on October 14th, students and faculty added to unrest, facing off with police as thousands of teachers went on an indefinite strike demanding higher pay and smaller classroom sizes. And in Italy on Friday, October 16th, demonstrations erupted in cities across the country, including Rome, where students marched on the education ministry and ignited firecrackers at police. The wave of unrest is not isolated to Europe, however. In Argentina, thousands of protesters gathered in Buenos Aires on October 15th, demanding President Javier Milei's government comply with a law updating public university funding. The massive demonstrations saw riot police fire tear gas as dozens of protesters hurled stones near the Congress building. While this isn't the first time that protests over these same issues have popped up in recent months and years, the scale, intensity and overlap of demonstrations is striking. We have seen protests across various different countries in Europe, we've seen unrest now spreading to Italy, in Albania, Spain, Portugal. And as to what the one underlying cause of that, it doesn't appear to be clear at this point. But what you could say is that there is a sense that a lot of Western European countries have kind of lost being able to control the narrative and control the agenda about where the continent goes from here and they're almost seeing a kind of uber crisis of migration on the southern borders soaring prices brought along by the ongoing war in Ukraine declining living standards being brought about by a sort of large welfare states in a lot of these countries and that's one thing that has been mentioned is that the French government spending accounts for 57% their GDP some of the highest levels in the world. So there is a sense that there is a lot of European governments simply don't know how they solve the multitude of crises that they're facing at one time.