French authorities announce partial curfews as PM blames ‘ultra-left’ for exploiting protests

• Partial curfews have been issued for a number of French cities, including parts of Paris, after the government admitted police had “lost control” during violent weekend protests around the country. An overnight curfew will come into effect from 11pm until 6am local time, for Place ​de la Republique ⁠and the streets around ⁠Les Halles ​in Paris. Authorities earlier issued the country’s first curfew the northern city of Lille and surrounding cities of Douai, Wattignies and Denain. Curfews were also announced in the southern cities of Nice (specifically for minors) and central Lyon, while Marseille, earlier announced independently that it had banned all gatherings and demonstrations on Monday.

• It came after France’s PM, Sébastien Lecornu, said after an emergency cabinet meeting that he was “fully resolved to restore public order” and had called for “local and partial” curfews if needed. There was “no question” of imposing a full curfew on entire cities, he said. Lecornu told reporters that if declaring a state of emergency was deemed necessary “we could do so”, but ⁠added that at this stage partial curfews seemed “more appropriate”.

• France’s interior minister conceded that police had “lost control” in some cities during Saturday’s protests and the president, Emmanuel Macron, demanded a full security review and “new operational methods” to end the rioting.Laurent Nuñez said there had been a “lack of anticipation” in preparations for the protests and acknowledged that police numbers had sometimes been inadequate to deal with rioters and looters on the fringes of the demonstrations. Nuñez said intelligence had suggested there would be 200,000 demonstrators around the country. In the event, there were more than half a million and peaceful protests were hijacked, morphing into one of France’s most violent days of unrest in recent years. Almost 2,400 arrests have been made.

• Nuñez said he had offered his resignation to Macron because he felt “responsible for everything that happened”, but the president had refused it, demanding instead that Nuñez “take all necessary steps to ensure transparency over planning and intelligence failures”. “You couldn’t look shopkeepers in the eye after hundreds of shops had been looted and say we hadn’t lost control,” the minister told French radio, but added that the responsibility of “rioters, looters and ultra-left militants” should not be glossed over.

• The original protests, led by students, teachers, parents, unions and workers, focused on the high cost of living, an issue that also prompted demonstrations in several other European countries including Italy, Belgium and Albania over the weekend.

Source: www.theguardian.com