A “feeling of humiliation”. Marine Le Pen and Jean-Luc Mélenchon both felt on Sunday that France was not “capable” of organizing large demonstrations, after the scenes of chaos which punctuated the Champions League final at the Stade de France. Questioned by the RTL-Le Figaro-LCI Grand Jury, the leader of the National Rally expressed a “feeling of humiliation because we are watched by the whole world and all the capitals who have seen this have noted that the France was no longer able to organize large demonstrations without them degenerating.
“It is confirmation that our state is collapsing under our feet. The reality is this. It’s that we no longer know how to organize a big event even though there are the Olympic Games in 18 months, which is extremely worrying, “added the presidential finalist, denouncing the” incompetence “of the Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin and Paris police prefect Didier Lallement.
“The picture is pathetic”
Same observation with the leader of La France insoumise who however points to the responsibility of the police in these incidents. “The image is lamentable, it is worrying because we can clearly see that we are not prepared for events like the Olympic Games”, launched Jean-Luc Mélenchon on BFMTV.
“It’s a complete failure of police strategy,” he said. “There must be a fundamental reflection to put the French police back in a device that makes it effective” because “the role of the police is to prevent things from going wrong, but there, on the contrary, they have aggravated things,” he said.
The match at the top of European football, which saw Real Madrid win against Liverpool (1-0), started with a delay of more than 30 minutes due to scenes of chaos outside the stadium, due to the influx of tens of thousands of supporters and intrusion attempts.
The two political leaders differ on the origin of the slippages: Marine Le Pen believes that the department of Seine-Saint-Denis, where the Stade de France is located, was “out of control”. This degenerated “partly by a disorganization for which the organizers will have to explain themselves, and then partly by a traditional delinquency” which makes “that at each event it turns into a riot, an attempt at looting”.
An organization made in haste
Jean-Luc Mélenchon mocked the side of the extreme right “the usual racist refrain”. “The problem last night was the doctrine for the use of law enforcement,” he insisted. Nearly 7,000 police, gendarmes and firefighters were mobilized on Saturday. It usually takes more than a year to prepare for such a planetary event. But after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the French Football Federation (FFF) recovered the organization initially entrusted to Saint Petersburg at the end of February.
And this reduced time may have weighed, as UEFA President Aleksander Ceferin hinted on Friday: “I told my teams: Don’t tell me you need a year or two ’cause we only got three weeks. It’s not easy,” he conceded.
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