France protests: Did the government make the wrong decisions?

We can now bring in Shirley Sitbon from our news desk. Shirley, it's great to see you. So I'm sure you, as many of our viewers, shocked by these violent images that we've seen from what happened last night. Now, there's been criticism that the government didn't anticipate the scope and level of violence. So what went wrong here? Well, a lot of things went wrong and we'll go through them, but let's see some images from today. You remember these images we saw a few minutes ago from Lyon, from the tour, the visitor center that was on fire yesterday. Well, we have the images from today. This is what it looks like today. Now people, this is a historic building, people going back, wondering how everything went wrong. We also have some images of Marseille, the city hall, which was stormed by protesters, not set on fire, but looted. So yes, what went wrong. Definitely, people are looking towards police and authorities. And starting with the people on the ground who are doing this intelligence, trying to inform authorities about what's happening, what's being planned, what are groups saying, people who are infiltrated, perhaps, in these groups, where are they? What were they doing? How could they get all this wrong? Did they not do their job correctly? Did they not analyze it right? Did they not give their analysis to the government? Did the government take the wrong decisions? A lot of questions. Some people are saying that maybe this is also linked to the fact that there was a reform a few years ago and means were cut down from some of these police services. There were several services merged together and they have less means altogether than they had separately, less people, less offices, less vehicles. Maybe that's linked to it. So what did authorities get wrong? Let's look first at the numbers, the numbers of protesters, of course, peaceful protesters just marching in the streets. Yesterday, we heard Laurent Nunez, the interior minister, talking about something like 200,000 people, 250,000 people. In the end, as you've said, officially 550,000, maybe up to 800,000, according to the organizers. So yes, the figure was wrong. But the main thing is the violence. And it started far earlier than police and authorities had anticipated hours before the protest and also they were surprised by the fact that these groups split into other small groups smaller groups across the capital for example so they were very difficult to follow and to stop and police has struggled with that so that's what many people are looking at and there's also criticism like we heard about these city halls being torched satellites we heard from today from the paris city hall we also heard from the marseille city hall saying police wasn't in the right place so what some people are saying especially on the left is that there wasn't enough police and that it didn't have the right strategy we can listen to one of these people who is the head of the green party marine tondolier and she talks about the fact that sometimes when police uh threw its tear gas at the crowd well it wasn't in the right place there was no violence and it triggered more chaos so let's listen to her when you don't tell the police to show restraint and instead even implicitly encourage them to do the opposite you fuel an escalation in tensions and of course in the end i'm happy to call for calm if you like but that needs to come from the government i'm tired of this country's approach to policing protests it needs to be reviewed quickly because it's becoming an infringement of civil liberties It puts everyone at risk, both protesters and police officers. And surely, there's also been a bit of criticism that there's a political angle to this since the student protests have been ongoing. There have been calls that the far left, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, is stirring up some of these violent elements. What more can you tell us about all of this? Yeah, and we heard about this before any violence was even seen on the ground when the students' protest, high school student protest, began. And so, yeah, it's true that there was a comment from one mayor saying that the students were right when he was next to a fire and when a journalist, one journalist had been attacked. And so and then he apologized and said he was he was wrong about that. But from the beginning, the party, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, said that they encouraged the protests, but not violent protests. And yesterday, throughout the day, Jean-Luc Mélenchon tweeted several times saying he condemned all the violence and that people should look at the hundreds of thousands also marching peacefully and listen to them and not only think about the destruction, but also try and bring some change. Among the perhaps political use, the various politicians, various officials talked yesterday, and some people can see this as trying to use this politically. For example, Marine Le Pen had a statement on Twitter where she said that she, if she'll be elected, first of all, no one will need to protest because she will bring up salaries and bring back subsidies and nobody will struggle. So nobody will need to protest. She'll protect the people. She also said that she, with the police, she'll back police and security forces to tackle all the violent groups, which she flagged, she called far-left groups. And so her message is, vote for me, whoever you are, I will bring back security. Meanwhile, the centrists, other parties, have looked at both sides. They accuse, as you've said, Jean-Luc Mélenchon of stirring violent and encouraging violent protests, which he denies. And they also say, well, look at what will happen. Imagine if Marine Le Pen will be elected this year, next year, in the upcoming election, what will happen? There'll be more people who will be unhappy. There'll be more chaos and more things will be destroyed. And if Jean-Luc Mélenchon is elected, well, then there'll definitely be chaos because those people we're seeing in the streets, they'll be encouraged even more. So yes, everybody is using the events of yesterday politically, and yes, we're less hearing them bringing some solutions to the problems of the people, which are of course very complicated to resolve, especially as France has debt problems, and so we have heard more about the violence than about actual solutions. We'll still be listening throughout the day.