00:00Let's bring in now Anne-Elisabeth Moutet, the French journalist and distinguished commentator.
00:06Anne-Elisabeth, you can't see the pictures, but we're looking at live pictures of Paris,
00:11and it looks like a very substantial French security response to meet these demonstrators.
00:20Yes, and it's not so much the demonstrators as the looters, who are a separate group.
00:26What happened last week left the country in a state of hangover, horrified by the destruction
00:33and sometimes the very dangerous destruction wrought by people who didn't hesitate to burn shops and restaurants
00:39that were on the ground floor of buildings that are five or six stories high.
00:44Nobody knows if the apartments in those buildings are still sort of fit to live in or whether there is
00:49structural damage.
00:50So there was shock, there was shock to the pillage, and the place where the authorities negotiated
00:57with the student organizations and the unions was alongside the Boulevard des Maréchaux,
01:04which was parallel to the round, the circle road, the sort of highway going round Paris.
01:11And the whole point is that this is far away from many shops, and this is certainly far away from
01:16the historic center of Paris.
01:17So the hope is that there will be less destruction.
01:21But it's, you know, you don't know whether people will escape, we don't know whether people will sort of stage
01:26something else.
01:27The yellow vests movement want to exist alongside the student protests, and the yellow vests said that they would have
01:35a much more central demonstration
01:37between Place de la Nation and Place de la République, and that was banned, so we don't know whether they
01:43will show up or not.
01:44It's a state of uncertainty, I should say, so far.
01:4770,000 cops deployed in and around Paris.
01:51What do you think is driving this anger? Because we keep on reporting on the students' dissatisfaction, the trade unions,
01:58the yellow vests movement.
01:59I mean, do you think there really is a common cause, or are we seeing different grievances converging?
02:08We are absolutely seeing different grievances, and the only thing is that we are doing all this on a background
02:18of presidential election,
02:20which will be next April if it's not called before, first round of April, second round beginning of May,
02:28when we elect a president who cannot be Emmanuel Macron because he had two turns.
02:33And we don't know exactly how that will play out, but certainly there are lots of parties on the hard
02:40left that are pushing for this to become the great insurrection that will cause the victory of Jean-Luc Mélenchon,
02:48or that will cause the defeat of Jean-Luc Mélenchon, our hard left figure, followed by a state, by literally,
02:55and he's been saying those exact words, a sort of national insurrection.
02:58It's very dicey. On the other hand, you've got the students and the pupils of high schools.
03:03They have perfectly legitimate grievances, and the first demonstration a month and a half ago was by teachers saying we
03:09can't teach,
03:10the schools are not heated, they're not kept cool in warm summers, we don't have the materials, we don't have
03:17substitute teachers,
03:18all of this that all the parents agree with, and to some extent the French politics have confiscated the revolt
03:27of the students,
03:28mostly by sort of speaking louder and doing sort of, you know, more violent acts,
03:33and partly because the students have decided that they are part of the hard left, or at least their leaders
03:38think that they are part of the hard left.
03:40And the whole sort of specific set of grievances that come with the high school students is a bit forgotten
03:48all this.
03:49France isn't far away now from a presidential election. I mean, how much could this unrest shape the political landscape,
03:57the election campaign, and even the results? I mean, would a change of government really change much in France?
04:06We will have a change of government, because, as I said, Emmanuel Macron cannot run again,
04:13and none of his former prime ministers has got a chance of getting in, except perhaps the first one,
04:19Édouard Philippe, the mayor of Le Havre. But we don't know, he's a centrist like Macron,
04:24in a very different style from Macron, but we've got extremes on the left and on the right.
04:29The favourite right now, and six months is a great deal of time in politics. The favourite is Marine Le
04:35Pen,
04:35the leader of the National Rally, the hard right party that tried to sort of moderate itself in the past
04:43years.
04:44And we've got, on the hard left, we've got Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who's a kind of, you know, extremely leftist
04:50hardliner,
04:51who, as I said earlier, said that insurrection was sometimes legitimate, violence was sometimes legitimate,
04:58and who's been stoking ethnic dissensions in every area of France where you've got working class and not,
05:06and sort of disadvantaged people, whose parents and grandparents immigrated to France in the last 40, 50 years.
05:14It's a toxic group. It's being instrumentalised. I would say that, does it predict the result of the elections?
05:23It may and it may not, to be honest. It's not part, we can't know for certain.
05:30Anne-Elisabeth, good to see you. Thanks so much for coming on the programme again.
05:33Anne-Elisabeth Moutet, the French journalist and commentator.
