PARIS ― French President Emmanuel Macron scored a Pyrrhic victory late Tuesday night after passing a flagship immigration bill in a vote that leaves his parliamentary coalition deeply scarred.
The bill imposes a series of measures that have been heavily criticized by the left as pandering to Marine Le Pen’s National Rally, while the far-right party claims the Macron government has been inspired by its long-time calls for foreigners to be excluded from state welfare benefits.
In a surprise move, the National Rally on Tuesday announced it would vote in favor of the latest version of the government’s bill, embarrassing the top brass of Macron’s party, who had to choose between passing a bill with far-right support or throwing in the towel.
The government managed to pass the law thanks to a last-minute pledge not to enact the legislation if it didn’t get enough support without the far right.
A total of 349 MPs, including lawmakers from Macron’s centrist coalition, the conservatives and 88 National Rally MPs, ultimately voted Tuesday in favor of the draft legislation, while 186 were against. While that may seem a comfortable majority, almost a quarter of the MPs from Macron’s coalition abstained or voted against the bill.
“There have been moments of great difficulty, but today we can be satisfied that a majority of MPs clearly voted for very strong measures,” Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin said after the vote.
But the government now faces a shattered coalition in parliament. The debates and compromises have left Macron’s allies badly bruised, with 27 MPs belonging to his centrist coalition voting against the latest version of the legislation.
Macron is now expected to speak on Wednesday to address the crisis.
Speculation is swelling that he might soon undertake a reshuffle including a change of prime minister to re-energize his government.
A point of contention on Tuesday was whether the government needed the National Rally votes to get its bill through parliament. During an emergency meeting at the Elysée Palace before the vote, Macron warned his party that if it failed to get a majority without the far right, he would refuse to enact the legislation. The move was meant to show that there was no tacit understanding or negotiation between Macron’s party and the party of his arch-rival Le Pen.
But while the government did not need RN MPs to pass the legislation, it would have failed if they had voted against the bill.
“It’s a sickening victory,” said far-left politician Jean-Luc Mélenchon in a scathing social media post. “Without the 88 votes of the National Rally,” the government would have “less than the absolute majority … A new political axis is appearing,” he said.
The immigration bill was a major test for Macron’s government as it seeks to repress a resurgent far right and respond to hardened public opinion on questions of migration and border control. It came after questions were raised about Macron’s ability to govern France after a defeat in parliamentary elections last year cost him his majority in the National Assembly.
Emmanuel Macron is facing widespread pushback, even from within his own ranks, from critics who say the president breached France’s long-standing history of secularism after he attended a Jewish ceremony in the Élysée Palace on Thursday.
Macron had been invited to receive an award for fighting antisemitism and safeguarding religious freedoms at an annual event from the Conference of European Rabbis.
During the event, France’s chief rabbi Haïm Korsia lit a ceremonial candle as members of the audience sang traditional Hanukkah songs in Hebrew. Lighting candles on a multi-branched candelabra, called a menorah, is a Jewish ritual that is part of the Hanukkah celebrations, which this year began on Thursday and will last until next Friday.
Macron said Friday, during a visit to the Notre-Dame cathedral in Paris, that he didn’t regret what happened “at all.”
“I think that on this point we need to keep our heads cool,” the French president told reporters. “Secularism isn’t about erasing religions. It’s about the fact that everyone has the right and freedom to believe and not to believe.”
Because of the French state’s sacrosanct principle of being strictly secular, Macron’s presence at a religious ritual in an official building had sparked criticism from all sides — including from some Jewish groups.
Yonathan Arfi, president of the French Jewish federation CRIF who also attended the event, told radio broadcaster Sud Radio on Friday that the lighting of the candle was “a mistake” and “should not have happened.”
“The Élysée is not the place to light a Hanukkah candle because the Republican DNA is to stay away from anything religious,” Arfi added.
Pierre Henriet, an MP from Macron’s own centrist Renaissance party, “strongly condemn[ed] this attempt at religious preferences,” adding, “By this act, Emmanuel Macron breaks with his role as guarantor of the neutrality of the State.”
Laurence Rossignol, a socialist lawmaker who is vice president of the French Senate, compared Macron to “a 10-year-old kid [playing] with a little chemist’s kit, but [with] real nitroglycerine and real matches.”
The far-right National Rally, meanwhile, claimed that Macron’s attendance at the Élysée event was meant to make up for his absence at a march against antisemitism in November, which sparked criticism for the French president.
“By lighting a candle for the religious holiday of Hanukkah at the Elysée … Macron has scorned our Jewish compatriots and at the same time our secularism,” National Rally spokesperson Julien Odoul said. “This president will never have understood France.”
The display of religious signs in public spaces and by state officials is a particularly sensitive issue in France, where church and state have been strictly separated by law since 1905, which often ignites fiery political debates. The 118th anniversary of the law’s implementation will coincidentally be celebrated on Saturday.
In September, Macron was criticized for attending a mass given by Pope Francis, head of the Catholic Church, at a football stadium in Marseille.
The French president has also been under increasing pressure to show his support to French Jews following the October 7 Hamas attacks on Israel, which triggered massive Israeli retaliation in the Gaza Strip. A sharp rise in antisemitism has followed the escalation of war in the Middle East.
Faced with the mounting criticism, Macron’s lieutenants went to bat for him Friday morning.
The French president “is a defender of religions … he respects them all as head of state, and there is no violation of secularism,” Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin — in charge of religious affairs through his Cabinet role — told public broadcaster Franceinfo.
The French president and Germany’s foreign affairs minister condemned Saturday’s knife attack in Paris that injured two and left a German national dead. Anti-terrorism prosecutors have opened an investigation into the assault.
Police arrested a 26-year-old Frenchman, who had been on the security services watchlist, soon after the attack Saturday night near the Eiffel Tower. Officials said the victim was with his wife when he was attacked and fatally stabbed on Quai de Grenelle.
“I send all my condolences to the family and loved ones of the German national who died this evening during the terrorist attack in Paris,” French President Emmanuel Macron said on X. “The national anti-terrorism prosecutor’s office … will be responsible for shedding light on this matter so that justice can be done in the name of the French people,” he said.
Emergency services treated the two injured, a French national and a foreign tourist, whose wounds are not life-threatening.
Following his arrest, the assailant told police he was distressed over how “many Muslims are dying in Afghanistan and in Palestine,” France’s interior minister, Gérald Darmanin, told reporters late Saturday. The suspect had served four years in jail for planning another attack in 2016.
“Shocking news from Paris,” German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock posted online. “My thoughts are with the friends and family of the young German who was killed in the suspected Islamist attack. Almost his entire life lay ahead of him,” she said. “Hate and terror have no place in Europe,” Baerbock said.
The two people injured in the incident were a Frenchman aged around 60 and a British tourist, the BBC reported. Neither was found to be in a life-threatening condition, it said.
Saturday’s incident comes less than two months after a similar incident in the northern French city of Arras. A teacher was slain and two people woundedin a knife attack at a school in Arras in mid-October.
The U.K., France, Germany, Spain and Italy have moved to bolster police protection of Jewish communities following the surprise attack by Hamas on Israel and the ensuing escalating conflict.
Governments across Europe fear an increase in antisemitic acts as the fighting between Israel and Iran-backed Hamas in Gaza unfolds, with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declaring it a “war.”
In London, Palestinian supporters were spotted celebrating on Saturday, prompting the police to create “reassurance patrols.”
London’s Metropolitan Police added that the conflict might lead to protests over the coming days. “We will ensure that an appropriate policing plan is in place in order to balance the right to protest against any disruption to Londoners,” they wrote in a statement.
Tensions between Israel and the Arab world are running high, as Netanyahu vowed to take “mighty vengeance” on Saturday, after over 350 Israelis were killed by the Hamas attacks on Israel. Netanyahu already started launching retaliatory air strikes on targets in Gaza early Saturday, killing around 200 Palestinians.
French Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin said on Saturday that he asked prefects across France to boost security for the Jewish community and that there were “no threats” so far, according to the Huffington Post, but that he’ll call a meeting to assess the situation.
This comes as French Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne called the French far-left La France Insoumise party harbored “a form of antisemitism” after it published a press release calling for “the end of [Israeli] colonization.”
Berlin’s police said they’ve “increased protective measures at Jewish and Israeli institutions” following the Hamas attacks, according to the Tagesspiegel.
The Central Council of Jews in Germany wrote that they’re “in intensive contact” with the authorities. “The following also applies: No violence, no riots and no hatred on German streets,” it said.
Jewish NGO the Anti-Defamation League wrote that “our data show extremists appear to be emboldened by the Hamas attack, and have increased their violent rhetoric, posting hate-filled messages and calls for further aggression against Israel and its supporters,” hinting at a potential rise in antisemitic violence.
Similar protective measures for the Jewish community were adopted in Spain and Italy.
This system, which has faced pushback from digital rights organizations and United Nations experts, will get its spotlight moment at the 2024 Paris Summer Olympics. In July next year, France will deploy large-scale, real-time, algorithm-supportedvideo surveillance cameras — a first in Europe. (Not included in the plan: facial recognition.)
Last month, the French parliament approved a controversial government plan to allow investigators to track suspected criminals in real-time via access to their devices’ geolocation, camera and microphone. Paris also lobbied in Brussels to be allowed to spy on reporters in the name of national security.
Helping France down the path of mass surveillance: a historically strong and centralized state; a powerful law enforcement community; political discourse increasingly focused on law and order; and the terrorist attacks of the 2010s. In the wake of President Emmanuel Macron’s agenda for so-called strategic autonomy, French defense and security giants, as well as innovative tech startups, have also gotten a boost to help them compete globally with American, Israeli and Chinese companies.
“Whenever there’s a security issue, the first reflex is surveillance and repression. There’s no attempt in either words or deeds to address it with a more social angle,” said Alouette, an activist at French digital rights NGO La Quadrature du Net who uses a pseudonym to protect her identity.
As surveillance and security laws have piled up in recent decades, advocates have lined up on opposite sides. Supporters argue law enforcement and intelligence agencies need such powers to fight terrorism and crime. Algorithmic video surveillance would have prevented the 2016 Nice terror attack, claimed Sacha Houlié, a prominent lawmaker from Macron’s Renaissance party.
Opponents point to the laws’ effect on civil liberties and fear France is morphing into a dystopian society. In June, the watchdog in charge of monitoring intelligence services said in a harsh report that French legislation is not compliant with the European Court of Human Rights’ case law, especially when it comes to intelligence-sharing between French and foreign agencies.
“We’re in a polarized debate with good guys and bad guys, where if you oppose mass surveillance, you’re on the bad guys’ side,” said Estelle Massé, Europe legislative manager and global data protection lead at digital rights NGO Access Now.
A history of surveillance
Both the 9/11 and the Paris 2015 terror attacks have accelerated mass surveillance in France, but the country’s tradition of snooping, monitoring and data collection dates way back — to Napoléon Bonaparte in the early 1800s.
“Historically, France has been at the forefront of these issues, in terms of police files and records. During the First Empire, France’s highly centralized government was determined to square the entire territory,” said Olivier Aïm, a lecturer at Sorbonne Université Celsa who authored a book on surveillance theories. Before electronic devices, paper was the main tool of control because identification documents were used to monitor travels, he explained.
The French emperor revived the Paris Police Prefecture — which exists to this day — and tasked law enforcement with new powers to keep political opponents in check.
In the 1880s, Alphonse Bertillon devised a method of identifying suspects and criminals using biometric features | Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images
In the 1880s, Alphonse Bertillon, who worked for the Paris Police Prefecture, introduced a new way of identifying suspects and criminals using biometric features — the forerunner of facial recognition. The Bertillon method would then be emulated across the world.
Between 1870 and 1940, under the Third Republic, the police kept a massive file — dubbed the National Security’s Central File — with information about 600,000 people, including anarchists and communists, certain foreigners, criminals, and people who requested identification documents.
After World War II ended, a bruised France moved away from hard-line security discourse until the 1970s. And in the early days of the 21st century, the 9/11 attacks in the United States marked a turning point, ushering in a steady stream of controversial surveillance laws — under both left- and right-wing governments. In the name of national security, lawmakers started giving intelligence services and law enforcement unprecedented powers to snoop on citizens, with limited judiciary oversight.
“Surveillance covers a history of security, a history of the police, a history of intelligence,” Aïm said. “Security issues have intensified with the fight against terrorism, the organization of major events and globalization.”
The rise of technology
In the 1970s, before the era of omnipresent smartphones, French public opinion initially pushed back against using technology to monitor citizens.
In 1974, as ministries started using computers, Le Monde revealed a plan to merge all citizens’ files into a single computerized database, a project known as SAFARI.
The project, abandoned amid the resulting scandal, led lawmakers to adopt robust data protection legislation — creating the country’s privacy regulator CNIL. France then became one of the few European countries with rules to protect civil liberties in the computer age.
However, the mass spread of technology — and more specifically video surveillance cameras in the 1990s — allowed politicians and local officials to come up with new, alluring promises: security in exchange for surveillance tech.
In 2020, there were about 90,000 video surveillance cameras powered by the police and the gendarmerie in France. The state helps local officials finance them via a dedicated public fund. After France’s violent riots in early July — which also saw Macron float social media bans during periods of unrest — Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin announced he would swiftly allocate €20 million to repair broken video surveillance devices.
In parallel, the rise of tech giants such as Google, Facebook and Apple in everyday life has led to so-called surveillance capitalism. And for French policymakers, U.S. tech giants’ data collection has over the years become an argument to explain why the state, too, should be allowed to gather people’s personal information.
“We give Californian startups our fingerprints, face identification, or access to our privacy from our living room via connected speakers, and we would refuse to let the state protect us in the public space?” Senator Stéphane Le Rudulier from the conservative Les Républicains said in June to justify the use of facial recognition on the street.
Strong state, strong statesmen
Resistance to mass surveillance does exist in France at the local level — especially against the development of so-called safe cities. Digital rights NGOs can boast a few wins: In the south of France, La Quadrature du Net scored a victory in an administrative court, blocking plans to test facial recognition in high schools.
Some grassroots movements have opposed surveillance schemes at the local level, but the nationwide legislative push has continued | Ludovic Marin/AFP via Getty Images
At the national level, however, security laws are too powerful a force, despite a few ongoing cases before the European Court of Human Rights. For example, France has de facto ignored multiple rulings from the EU top court that deemed mass data retention illegal.
Often at the center of France’s push for more state surveillance: the interior minister. This influential office, whose constituency includes the law enforcement and intelligence community, is described as a “stepping stone” toward the premiership — or even the presidency.
“Interior ministers are often powerful, well-known and hyper-present in the media. Each new minister pushes for new reforms, new powers, leading to the construction of a never-ending security tower,” said Access Now’s Massé.
Under Socialist François Hollande, Manuel Valls and Bernard Cazeneuve both went from interior minister to prime minister in, respectively, 2014 and 2016. Nicolas Sarkozy, Jacques Chirac’s interior minister from 2005 to 2007, was then elected president. All shepherded new surveillance laws under their tenure.
In the past year, Darmanin has been instrumental in pushing for the use of police drones, even going against the CNIL.
For politicians, even at the local level, there is little to gain electorally by arguing against expanded snooping and the monitoring of public space. “Many on the left, especially in complicated cities, feel obliged to go along, fearing accusations of being soft [on crime],” said Noémie Levain, a legal and political analyst at La Quadrature du Net. “The political cost of reversing a security law is too high,” she added.
It’s also the case that there’s often little pushback from the public. In March,on the same day a handful of French MPs voted to allow AI-powered video surveillance cameras at the 2024 Paris Olympics, about 1 million people took to the streets to protest against … Macron’s pension reform.
Sovereign cameras
For politicians, France’s industrial competitiveness is also at stake. The country is home to defense giants that dabble in both the military and civilian sectors, such as Thalès and Safran. Meanwhile, Idemia specializes in biometrics and identification.
“What’s accelerating legislation is also a global industrial and geopolitical context: Surveillance technologies are a Trojan horse for artificial intelligence,” said Caroline Lequesne Rot, an associate professor at the Côte d’Azur University, adding that French policymakers are worried about foreign rivals. “Europe is caught between the stranglehold of China and the U.S. The idea is to give our companies access to markets and allow them to train.”
In 2019, then-Digital Minister Cédric O told Le Monde that experimenting with facial recognition was needed to allow French companies to improve their technology.
France’s surveillance apparatus will be on full display at the 2024 Olympic Games | Patrick Kovarik/AFP via Getty Images
For the video surveillance industry — which made €1.6 billion in France in 2020 — the 2024 Paris Olympics will be a golden opportunity to test their products and services and showcase what they can do in terms of AI-powered surveillance.
XXII — an AI startup with funding from the armed forces ministry and at least some political backing — has already hinted it would be ready to secure the mega sports event.
“If we don’t encourage the development of French and European solutions, we run the risk of later becoming dependent on software developed by foreign powers,” wrote lawmakers Philippe Latombe, from Macron’s allied party Modem, and Philippe Gosselin, from Les Républicains, in a parliamentary report on video surveillance released in April.
“When it comes to artificial intelligence, losing control means undermining our sovereignty,” they added.
Nearly 1,000 rioters were arrested last night for taking part in the most violent protests France has experienced in years, according to estimates by Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin.
The killing of a 17-year-old of Algerian and Moroccan descent by a police officer on Tuesday unleashed violent demonstrations in the Paris suburb of Nanterre, where the teen was shot. The violence then spread across the entire country and its main cities.
The shooting of the teen, identified as Nahel M., reignited long-simmering tensions between the youth of the banlieues – typically disadvantaged and multi-ethnic neighborhoods — and the police, accused of brutality and racial discrimination.
Nahel’s funeral is scheduled to take place at 2 p.m. on Saturday in Nanterre, with authorities tensing for more demonstrations.
To address the turmoil, France deployed 45,000 police and gendarmes across all major cities on Friday night, of which 5,000 were tasked with patrolling Paris. Authorities also set curfews around the capital, banned public gatherings in certain municipalities and halted all bus and tram services after 9 p.m.
Despite the massive security efforts, the unrest doesn’t seem to be calming down, with public buildings, hotels, stores and cars continuing to be targeted and set ablaze. The Interior Ministry said early Saturday that 1,350 vehicles and 234 buildings were torched overnight, plus 2,560 incidents of fire set in public spaces, AFP reported.
Darmanin said that 200 police officers have been injured since the start of the rioting.
French President Emmanuel Macron said the killing of the teenager was “inexplicable” and “inexcusable,” although he also promptly blamed social media for spreading violent content and stoking the violence after the tragic event.
“We’ve seen violent gatherings organized on several [social media platforms] — but also a kind of mimicry of violence,” Macron said on Friday, accusing younger rioters of “living the video games that have intoxicated them.”
Events including two concerts at the Stade de France on the outskirts of Paris were cancelled. Tour de France organizers said they were ready to adapt to any situation when the race enters the country on Monday after starting in the Spanish city of Bilbao, Reuters reported.
Religious leaders, including Chems-Eddine Hafiz, the rector of the Grand Mosque of Paris, called for the violence to stop.
France fears a repeat of the civil unrest in 2005, when three weeks of riots rocked the country after two teenagers of African origins were electrocuted in a power substation while trying to escape the police.
