Bloomberg's Oliver Crook Talks France Protests

SPEAKER_1 (0:02)

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SPEAKER_2 (0:07)

We want to get back over to Paris, France. A lot of unrest over there, a lot of civil unrest, which has really been escalating over the last several weeks. Here we can do that with our good friend, Oliver Crook, chief Europe correspondent for Bloomberg News. He joins us live from Paris. Oliver, what are we seeing over the last week? And it seemed to really escalate some of these riots, some of these looting and some of these issues, and a lot of pretty heavy handed crackdown by the police as well. What's the latest?

Oliver Crook (0:36)

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, Paris still bears the scars. You can see it everywhere from what we saw over the weekend, really escalating on Saturday, but not just in Paris. This is a set of riots that really moved just from outside of the capital. You know, the Gilets Jaunes movement back in 2018 was really concentrated here in Paris in terms of the volume of damage, but you saw those really shocking images of that town hall in Limoges that burned down. There were massive protests in Marseille. And today is really about cleaning up the city of Paris, but also getting some of these emergency measures out by the government in order to prevent this from happening again. So we've heard from the Prime Minister of France, Sebastien Lecornu, after a crisis cabinet meeting, he says that there actually may be curfews that will be imposed in parts of France in order to prevent that situation. We've heard also from the Interior Minister who says that even more police will be deployed next weekend in anticipation of another day of protest, and potentially next Saturday. We should say this is the very same Interior Minister who submitted his resignation to Emmanuel Macron over the weekend, and Emmanuel Macron, of course, rejected it. I think for this government, they're just trying to find ways to kind of circuit break this situation in order to prevent it from becoming what we had in back 2018 and 2019 with that yellow vest movement, where every weekend, you have protests Saturday after Saturday after Saturday, but some of these protests would basically just degenerate into these riots. The real issue is, like in 2018, this began as a movement that was based in some political motive. That was to get better funding for schools, for commentary on the cost of living, and then comes completely out of hand and really goes into the hands of people who are just interested in vandalizing and breaking and stealing. And you see a lot of evidence of that across Paris today.

SPEAKER_4 (2:14)

Hey, Oliver, talk to us specifically about those partial curfews and what specifically could be put in place.

Oliver Crook (2:19)

So what's interesting is that Emmanuel Macron, after speaking on Saturday, I should say Sunday evening at 8 p.m., he only spoke for about 8 minutes. He didn't give a whole lot of information in terms of what the government was intending to do, but he did say he will give more power to the local government. So that is part of this calculus here, the giving more power to the government to potentially ban protests and to potentially bring curfews in. What's very interesting is that after doing that last night, we got on the plane and Emmanuel Macron is doing now a tour of the Gulf, of a number of the Middle Eastern nations. A sort of interesting time for the president to leave France, leaving a lot of political space for commentary from all of those people that are running for a presidential election over the next six months, whether it's Marine Le Pen, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who all have very different diagnosis of why this is happening here in France and what the solution should be. As you might not be surprised, the right wing, Marine Le Pen, says she's gonna be the candidate of law and order and bring sort of sovereignty and authority back to France, whereas Jean-Luc Mélenchon on the left really takes much more sympathy with the students in saying that actually it's the heavy hand of the police that is really to blame for a lot of the issues we've had over the weekend. All right, very good.

SPEAKER_2 (3:27)

Appreciate that reporting. Oliver Crook, Chief Europe Correspondent for Bloomberg News, he is in Paris.