France to deploy 70,000 police across country on Saturday to prevent unrest

The security forces will include elite units usually used for counter-terrorism operations and hostage rescues. Interior minister Laurent Nunez said social media calls for violence had come from “ultra-left” groups.

Macron and his government are struggling to get on top of a crisis that has caught it off guard six months before presidential elections to choose his successor. The government has admitted it “lost control” over widespread rioting on Saturday.

Largely peaceful demonstrations were hijacked by groups of determined rioters, degenerating into rampant violence and extensive looting in Paris, Marseille, Lyon and other cities. In Limoges, the town hall was set on fire and partly destroyed.

The operation will include 10,000 more police, water cannon, armoured vehicles, mounted police, helicopters and drones. Interior minister Gérald Darmanin said 217 people – half of them first-time offenders – had been jailed since Saturday.

On Thursday, Macron called for “the utmost severity” against “acts of delinquency”, saying gangs of rioters had been mainly responsible for the looting but the worst violence was caused by “ultra-left” groups seeking to “bring down the republic”.

Adding to the tensions, the far-right leader Marine Le Pen, the frontrunner for next spring’s presidential elections, is due to host her National Rally party congress in Orléans, drawing thousands of supporters – and left-wing, anti-racist opponents.

Further stoking tensions, one person was killed and four others injured – including a 12-year-old girl – in a shooting in the town of Trappes, west of Paris, on Friday in an attack that police said could have been racially motivated.

Europe-wide wave of protests

Demonstrations are expected in several other countries this weekend, triggered by a broader, continent-wide wave of discontent over declining public services, housing affordability, public sector budget cuts and the spiralling cost of living.

Protests over related grievances have been called for Saturday in Milan, Rome and Turin in Italy; in Vienna, Austria; and in Madrid, Barcelona and other cities in Spain, as well as in Lisbon and Porto in Portugal, Dublin in Ireland and Tirana in Albania.

Protests are expected across France on Saturday, although several cities have banned demonstrations or forced them to change their planned routes to protect shops and public buildings, and forecast heavy rain and high winds could dampen turnout.

The centres of Lyon and some other large cities will be off-limits to protesters, while authorities in Paris authorised a union march along a limited route in the east of the capital, between the Places de la Bastille and Nation, that will avoid the city centre.

But requests for rallies in Paris organised by France’s main student union, UNEF, and the gilets jaunes movement, whose nationwide protests rocked France in 2018 and which plans 600 small-scale events around France on Saturday, were refused.

UNEF said its rallies, which grew from high school protests last month against teacher shortages and dilapidated facilities, would go ahead regardless. Several of Paris’ best-known cultural institutions, including the Louvre, said they would close on Saturday.

Authorities in Marseille had also banned all protests, but announced on Friday that a union-organised demonstration would be allowed on an “exceptional basis”. It will be the only authorised protest in the southern Bouches-du-Rhone department.

Unionists and opposition leaders have criticised the government for refusing to allow more rallies on Saturday, a decision being challenged in court in several cities. Marylise Léon of the CFDT union federation accused Macron of an abuse of authority.

The radical left La France Insoumise party of Jean-Luc Mélenchon said the government had “crossed the lines that separate a democracy from an authoritarian and police state”, adding that the bans would only “generate more chaos”.