Post-election chaos sees vehicles burned, mass arrests
France was plunged into a third consecutive night of mob violence, originally sparked by the election last Sunday of conservative Nicolas Sarkozy to the French Presidency. Cars were burned nationwide as riot police fought roving gangs of immigrant youths and masked leftists and making scores of arrests.
Sarkozy’s opponent, Socialist Segolene Royal had warned on the last day of the campaign that France should expect such violence if she lost. Now Socialist chiefs are appealing in vain for the riots to stop, fearing a beating at the upcoming June legislative elections for aligning themselves with the immigrant and far left gangs carrying out the violence. The French government is attempting to spin the news, claiming that since “only” around 200 cars were destroyed overnight compared to the 700 on Sunday, the situation is improving.
Such violence, which became international news in November, 2005, when immigrant youth went on a weeks-long spree, has humiliated the French establishment, which once used to pride itself on its race relations system, especially compared to the United States. However, the deepening dislocation of all of French society has pushed the nation to a crisis point.Sarkozy is under attack for sitting out the worst of the violence on a yacht in the Mediterranean and on a Maltese beach. “I have no intention of apologising,” he told the media; however he plans to make it back to Paris to celebrate the anniversary of the abolition of the slave system, a pandering sop to Third World immigrants that is likely to further alienate him from concerned French people who believed him when he took an anti-immigration and law and order stance in an effort to co-opt the voters and policies of nationalist Jean-Marie Le Pen, once dismissed as an “extremist” for predicting the kind of chaos France now has to cope with. Le Pen’s National Front is likely to benefit from widespread disgust with the anarchy at the June polls.
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