French President Emmanuel Macron flew to Qatar this week and decided the real problem with France burning isn’t the burning. It’s that people keep talking about it. Standing at a podium on, Macron called footage of the nationwide riots AI-generated misinformation and branded foreign leaders who dared to notice the chaos as ‘stupid.’
The man has some nerve. France has been dealing with mass looting, arson, and attacks on police for about a month now. Approximately 2,500 people were taken into custody. At least 3,000 businesses were reportedly damaged or looted. Limoges’s historic town hall was gutted by fire. Police officers were attacked across multiple cities. A Paris synagogue was ransacked. And Macron’s big move is to go to the Middle East and tell the world not to believe its own eyes.
When asked if his criticism of foreign leaders included President Donald Trump, Macron replied, ‘Among others.’ Trump had denounced the violence as a consequence of immigration and far-left radicalism and urged Macron to close France’s borders. Vice President JD Vance accused Western liberals of ignoring basic questions of assimilation and cultural compatibility. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned about extremist Islam. Hungarian Prime Minister Péter Magyar said the destruction proved his government’s strict immigration policies right. El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele suggested that real leadership could restore order within a week. Macron’s response to all of them was essentially: you’re just doing it for votes, and also the videos are fake. Sure, Emmanuel.
Macron claimed allegations that France had been ‘invaded by hordes of migrants and Islamists’ were ‘completely false,’ then accused those foreign leaders of exploiting France’s domestic crisis for electoral purposes and said people who spoke negatively about the country did not love it. Nothing says strong leadership like telling everyone criticizing your failures that they just don’t care enough.
Back home, his own government wasn’t exactly backing him up. Education Minister Édouard Geffray accused Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s far-left France Unbowed party of fueling the mobilization, while Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu accused far-left extremists of orchestrating parts of the violence, including the attack on Limoges’s town hall. A suspected ultra-left extremist was arrested in connection with that arson. Palestinian flags became a popular accessory at protests supposedly about living costs and schools, and looters mostly targeted Jewish, French, and Chinese-owned shops rather than Muslim-owned businesses. Macron riots and immigration crisis details how the unrest began in Paris’s immigrant-heavy districts and was later exploited by radical groups.
Meanwhile, Macron’s approval numbers are somewhere between embarrassing and historically catastrophic. An Ifop poll published Monday found just 17 percent of French people were satisfied with his performance, while a record 56 percent were ‘very dissatisfied.’ The man who once styled himself as a bold reformer and savior of the European liberal order is now presiding over cities on fire with a satisfaction rating that wouldn’t win a local school board election.
What happens next is anyone’s guess, though Macron will almost certainly keep blaming everyone except himself and the policies that got France here. His remarks, as one analysis put it, ‘look less like a rebuttal than an attempt by a president to argue his way out of a failure he can no longer hide.’ Paris is literally in flames, and Macron’s best defense is that your phone is lying to you. At this point the AI deserves more credit for governing France than he does.
We can all agree on one thing, it’s that leftist leadership is a complete failure.
