On June 27, 2023, Nahel, 17, multiplied the offenses at the wheel of a powerful car that he was not old enough to drive in the near Paris suburbs. Arrested by police officers, he was killed by a bullet fired at close range. A video is circulating on social networks. France is on fire.
Mont-Saint-Martin, a town of 10,000 inhabitants bordering Luxembourg and Belgium, is particularly affected. In two weeks, nine public buildings, including a primary school and a center for autistic children, were burned or damaged there.
“It is the commune which embodies the Republic today”, notes, a year after the events, Patrice Marini, 1st deputy to the communist mayor of the city. “We are on the front line.”
Mont-Saint-Martin was usually rather quiet, with its individual houses with gardens on one side, and its terraced houses next to buildings on the other, in the poorer Val district, where 4,000 people live.
“The riots seemed completely incomprehensible to us,” recalls the municipal representative, who considers them linked “to poverty and the loss of public services”. Last mid-July, several young people from Val, interviewed by AFP, nevertheless identified with Nahel. “It could have been us.”
The riots, along with deadly knife fights between teenagers in usually quiet towns and villages, have made crime a hot topic ahead of early parliamentary elections which begin on Sunday.
Summoned by President Emmanuel Macron after his party’s rout in the last European elections, they seem to be moving towards a victory for the far-right National Rally party which has long placed the fight against insecurity at the heart of its electoral strategy.
Tom Maiani, a 24-year-old waiter from a village near Mont-Saint-Martin, RN activist, says he was “comforted in his political choice” by the riots. He who had then spent every night driving around in his car, for fear that it would be one of the 70 vehicles burned in the city, is now a deputy for the RN candidate in the legislative elections.
“Young people no longer want a chaotic France,” said Mr Maiani, whose car was ultimately vandalized.
Most delinquency indicators are in fact “increasing in 2023” in France, “but slowing compared to the previous year”, points out an analysis by the Ministry of the Interior published in January.
Shootings linked to drug trafficking, a recent and highly publicized phenomenon, have plunged many French people into fear. Initially rather localized in Marseille and in the South, they then spread elsewhere in the territory. Like in Villerupt, 20 minutes from Mont-Saint-Martin, where shootings between rival gangs left five people injured in May 2023.
Frédéric Weber, ex-unionist candidate for deputy for the RN in the constituency of Mont-Saint-Martin, links the increase in crime to “the massive arrival of migrants in recent years”.
Another antiphon of his party, even if foreigners are only implicated in 17% of cases of “personal attacks” (violence, rape, harassment, homicides, etc.), according to the Ministry of the Interior .
At the beginning of June, a poll for the conservative news channel C News showed, however, that two-thirds of French people linked crime and immigration.
“The deterioration of the security situation has powerfully fueled the dynamic” of the far right, estimates Jérôme Fourquet, director of the Ifop polling institute, who reports a “strong demand for protection, but also for regaining control of the situation” by the State.
Cafe owner Saïd Lounnas, 53, sees the riots as a manifestation of the fact that “the children have taken over (their) parents”.
The president of the RN Jordan Bardella has committed to modifying the law to facilitate the expulsion of foreigners convicted of crimes and to reducing the allowances paid to the parents of young repeat offenders.
The outgoing radical left MP, Martine Etienne, denounces the “social neglect” and economic liberalism of Emmanuel Macron, which according to the elected representative has widened inequalities and inflamed consciences.
Met by AFP during a towing operation in an almost empty market, the parliamentarian seemed for a time to be preaching in the desert. “It’s too late, ma’am,” replied Jacques Bonoris, an 84-year-old retiree. “In my street, everyone votes RN.”
