Frances

Interior Minister Laurent Nunez acknowledges that police ‘lost control’ during weekend protests.

French ⁠President ⁠Emmanuel Macron has declined Interior Minister Laurent Nunez’s offer to resign ⁠after nationwide demonstrations by students protesting educational conditions and groups angry over the high cost of living turned into widespread riots and looting, the Elysee presidential office says.

Macron said Nunez should stay in his position to ensure the chain of command is maintained within the police and security forces and asked the interior minister ⁠to establish new methods to deal with looters, the Elysee said in a statement on ⁠Monday.

The president also asked Nunez to “take all necessary steps to ensure transparency over the failures in planning and intelligence that led to the violence”, the statement added.

The Ministry of the Interior said more than 2,300 people were arrested and almost 1,000 police and gendarmes injured in protests on Saturday. Injuries were also reported among protesters, with one demonstrator’s hand blown off by a police crowd-control grenade.

The nationwide demonstrations brought together students demanding better conditions in the French education system and residents protesting against the high cost of living and faltering public services.

More than half a million people took part in the protests on Saturday. Looting, arson and damage to property occurred in many cities, with masked rioters attacking town halls, police stations and other government buildings.

Nunez acknowledged on Monday that police “lost control” during the protests.

“On Saturday in some major cities, you couldn’t look shopkeepers in the eye after hundreds of shops had been looted and tell them we hadn’t lost control,” Nunez said.

Nunez acknowledged a “lack of anticipation” in the deployment of security forces on Saturday, saying their numbers were insufficient to deal with the large crowds of rioters and looters on the fringes of the demonstrations.

He estimated that 60,000 law enforcement personnel were deployed across the country that day.

“Given the damage that has been caused, it was only right that I should hand in my resignation,” Nunez said.

Looting continued on Sunday, and Paris Mayor Emmanuel Gregoire said on Monday that about 30 shops had been targeted in the capital the previous day, describing the scenes as “unbearable”.

Nunez said about 350 people were arrested in Paris on Sunday and overnight.

Nationwide, more than 2,330 people were taken into police custody over the weekend, 70 percent of whom were adults, Justice Minister Gerald Darmanin said.

The violent weekend demonstrations followed weeks of protests by high school students against overcrowded classrooms, teacher shortages and underinvestment in education, the biggest youth-led protest movement in the country in recent memory.

President Macron promises to increase security, but stops short of announcing a state of emergency or curfew.

French President Emmanuel Macron has expressed “anger and shame” over what he described as violent protesters’ attempts “to bring down the republic”.

In a televised address to the nation on Sunday, Macron promised that rioters and looters would “pay for their crimes”, after Saturday saw some of the worst urban violence in France in years.

The country’s Interior Ministry said that nearly 2,400 people were arrested on Saturday, with about 1,000 police and gendarmes injured.

Macron said there must be a distinction between protesters with “legitimate demands” and “those who destroyed, smashed, and looted”.

The president pledged to launch a “crisis unit” to provide “urgent aid … for those who are going through difficult moments”. He added that “lessons will be learned” after the destructive violence erupted this weekend.

“We need to be clear: yesterday, our law enforcement officers and officials, despite their professionalism, were subjected to unprecedented violence in several cities,” he said.

“I’ve asked the government to provide all the lessons learned and to be able to anticipate it to make sure that this does not happen again,” Macron said, adding: “We need unity, we need calm and respect.”

Reporting from Paris, Al Jazeera’s Natacha Butler said Macron’s speech had “perhaps no surprises”.

“Whether it’s going to be enough to placate some people, I’m not really sure, because those who have been out protesting say they’re fed up of hearing these sorts of speeches by the French president,” Butler said.

The protests are quickly becoming a political football for parties vying for public support ahead of presidential elections next year.

Left-wing presidential candidate Jean-Luc Melenchon said the French government is “solely responsible” for the destruction during protests, and has “failed to organise the maintenance of public order”.

Far-right presidential hopeful Jordan Bardella called Macron’s Sunday speech “lamentable” and “cowardly”, saying the government has nothing left to offer the French people and “cannot even protect them”.

Protests are sweeping France as anger over conditions in schools meets frustration with high living costs and a government accused of doing little to address problems facing people.

About 550,000 people demonstrated nationwide on Saturday, according to the Interior Ministry. Most marched peacefully, while a small minority attacked buildings, looted shops and clashed with police, who fired tear gas and charged protesters.

Prime Minister Sebastien Lecornu said 1,200 people were arrested and 150 police officers were injured. Behind the confrontations lies a political crisis, fuelled by anger at deteriorating services and overstretched household budgets, and compounded by a sense that France’s political institutions offer little hope of change.

Here is how school blockades became a nationwide movement – and what that means for President Emmanuel Macron.

How have the protests spread, what are protesters demanding?

The movement began last month in high schools in Paris’ working-class northern suburbs, where students protested against teacher shortages and poor facilities. School blockades and demonstrations later spread to cities including Bordeaux, Rennes, Nantes, Lyon, Lille and Marseille.

Saturday brought together students and trade unions, alongside supporters of the “yellow vest” movement that emerged in 2018 to challenge rising living costs and economic inequality.

Emile Chabal, a professor of contemporary history at the University of Edinburgh, told Al Jazeera the demonstrations were “the logical outcome of a series of protests” stretching back to the yellow vests.

That movement was driven by financial pressures and resentment at “the French presidential system”, he told Al Jazeera, alluding to a structure which often leads to the election of a centrist candidate, such as President Emmanuel Macron.

Saturday combined those longstanding grievances with students’ anger at deteriorating state schools. The yellow vests had demanded better public services.

Bringing students’ grievances together with wider social demands, therefore, represented “the worst possible outcome for the French government”, Chabal said.

Students’ immediate demands concern conditions in France’s lycees (public high schools), which generally educate pupils aged 15 to 18. They want smaller classes, enough teachers, better buildings and less exhausting timetables. Their complaints also reflect broader concerns about whether the state can provide the education and opportunities young people need.

But for workers, including school staff, the dispute also concerns wages and the resources available to deliver public services.

The school protests coincided with a nationwide public sector strike against the government’s budget plans. Bringing all these concerns together under one umbrella represented “the worst possible outcome for the French government”, Chabal said.

It comes as the proposed 2027 budget includes a 54 billion euro ($60.8bn) package of cost-cutting and tax measures, which the government says is necessary to reduce France’s deficit. The proposals include freezing the pay scale used to calculate civil servants’ basic salaries, which unions say would be the fourth consecutive annual freeze.

Donatella della Porta, a sociologist and political scientist, said students were inspiring wider mobilisation around inequality, cuts to public investment and democratic rights, with demands for social welfare spending rather than militarisation.

“They do not want to fight wars; they want a different future,” she told Al Jazeera.

She also linked the movement to young people’s mobilisation over Gaza, with Palestinian flags appearing at demonstrations across several European countries.

How has the government responded?

The government has focused its immediate response on public order, with President Macron saying those responsible for violence would be “prosecuted and punished”.

His comments came as a fire largely destroyed the historic town hall in the city of Limoges, while public buildings and shops were attacked elsewhere.

But those involved in violence represent only a small minority of the much larger mobilisation. Jean-Luc Melenchon, leader of the left-wing France Unbowed party, has accused the government of repressing school students and allowing the confrontation to intensify.

His argument reflects a wider political dispute about whether the government treats the protests chiefly as a security problem or addresses the grievances that have brought different groups together.

Experts say France’s problems extend beyond disagreement over individual budget measures and reflect deeper discontent. Emile Chabal, from the University of Edinburgh, said political paralysis since the 2024 parliamentary elections, which left no bloc with an outright majority, had created “an environment in which no political party or movement is able to channel social discontent”.

That fragmentation makes it difficult to build a durable agreement on spending, taxation or public services. It also leaves protesters questioning whether changing governments produces meaningful changes in policy.

The protests are also “a tough blow for Macron”, Chabal said, whose promises of youthful energy and a reformed, dynamic France have been undermined by “his inability to articulate his political project and his deeply unempathetic persona”.

Chabal added that the unrest included violence sometimes seen on the fringes of French demonstrations, with direct-action tactics associated with the yellow vests. Targets included shops and, more unusually, public buildings. He described the destruction of Limoges’ town hall as particularly significant because of its place in France’s civic history.

Other researchers emphasise the role of policing. Guya Accornero, a specialist in social movements at Lisbon’s University Institute, said previous confrontations had created lasting tensions between protesters and police.

During the current protests, a 15-year-old lost a hand to a police stun grenade, while a 14-year-old suffered a shattered jaw after being struck by a tear gas canister fired at close range, according to Human Rights Watch. The organisation condemned excessive force against children, saying the demonstrations had been overwhelmingly peaceful.

“Young people have been violently repressed also when using non-disruptive tactics,” she told Al Jazeera.

Who could benefit politically?

There is no clear answer from the experts who spoke to Al Jazeera. Paul Smith, an associate professor in French history and politics at the University of Nottingham, believes far-right leader Marine Le Pen stands to gain.

“I see only one beneficiary and that’s Le Pen,” he told Al Jazeera, suggesting the unrest could also damage Melenchon’s presidential prospects.

Chabal cautioned against assuming a far-right gain, but he said fear of disorder had historically benefited conservative or centrist parties in France, including after the 1968 protests.

Le Pen has not entirely dismissed the protesters’ grievances, describing them on X on Saturday as “legitimate social demands”, while claiming they had been “held hostage by the far left”.

The far-right may seek to reap the rewards of public discontent, but experts say it is more likely to channel that anger towards immigration and the scapegoating of migrants, rather than blaming the structures of neoliberalism and capitalism for the protesters’ woes, as Melenchon has suggested.

With a presidential election due in April 2027, candidates face competing pressures, demonstrating that they can restore order while convincing voters they will address the conditions behind the mobilisation.

The challenge, Chabal said, is how to create change in “an environment in which no political party or movement is able to channel social discontent”.

Aaron Sorkin’s “The Social Reckoning,” a sequel to 2010’s David Fincher-directed “The Social Network,” is hitting theaters as part of a surge of tech geek takedowns that includes documentaries on Elon Musk and Theranos’ Elizabeth Holmes, as well as Luca Guadagnino’s upcoming comedy “Artificial” about OpenAI’s Sam Altman.

Still, its timing couldn’t be worse.

Cursory and hollow, it recounts the true story of Wall Street Journal reporter Jeff Horwitz (Jeremy Allen White) and Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen (Mikey Madison), a disenchanted data engineer on the company’s civic integrity team, who paired up for a 17-part investigative series that provided proof of what people already sensed: Facebook boosted misinformation and rage-bait to juice user engagement at the cost of our country’s mental health.

The script ends shortly after Haugen testified before Congress in October 2021, noting that the carpet in her waiting room had recently been swapped out because of bloodstains from the Jan. 6 Capitol attack. The film rewinds to that day, too, and attempts to squeeze drama from slow-motion reenactments of the rioters, which Alexandre Desplat scores to an overbearing military dirge as Mark Zuckerberg (Jeremy Strong) and his good little Facebook soldiers mull over whether to take down the U.S. president’s incendiary posts.

Back in our own reality, Zuckerberg and the president just had lunch last week. At this point, we’re all so psychically drained that the only response we can muster to this vacant period piece is: So what?

Sorkin has my sympathies. The future moves faster than a film in development. And he fundamentally gets the peril we’ve put ourselves in by entrusting Zuckerberg, who is, at minimum, an ethically askew man. After all, Sorkin’s own screenplay for “The Social Network” remains a prescient masterpiece.

But the movie’s problems go beyond arriving simultaneously too slowly and too soon for Zuckerberg’s endgame, where his emptying social media empire has him gambling his fortunes (and ours) on AI. Expanding his scope from Harvard to the planet, Sorkin now aims to show that we’re all trapped in Zuckerberg’s insensitive mind view. Cold computer speak has infected everyone like a virus. When Madison’s Frances goes on a blind date, her online match says he appreciates that the internet makes it simpler for singles to pair up “within their own vector.” The buddy-buddy Winkelvoss twins’ version of the app might actually have been better for the world.

Meanwhile, Zuckerberg, who mostly stays on the sidelines of the movie, is now a mighty billionaire and, as Strong plays him, a dour, lifeless dork. Gone are the beer bashes, the thrill of invention and any hint that Zuckerberg lusted for something — women, attention, clout — other than a quarterly earnings report. This Zuckerberg is no longer made of flesh and blood but ones and zeros. Pity Strong couldn’t play the CEO after his bro-y 2024 mutation into MMA-fighting Marky Mark. At least that guy is amusingly ridiculous. Trapped in this stiffer, earlier incarnation, the only acting Strong is able to do is poke his head straight up from his shoulders until he resembles a retractable pen.

Worse, all the other characters in the film talk just like him: charmless, frigid and quick to cut each other off with snippy corrections. I could forgive that if it was just Facebook’s employees: Madison’s quavering, exasperated Frances, the co-worker (Anna Lambe) who insists she and Frances are merely colleagues, not friends, even after their company frittered away the meaning of the word, and a media relations executive (a smooth Billy Magnussen) who gets the scariest line, coolly insisting that “we’re post-government around here.” After all, these are the folks who saw “The Social Network” and still wanted to work for Zuckerberg.

But the opposition is steeped in that same monotone rudeness. Sorkin must have adored that earlier film’s opening scene where Rooney Mara insults a clueless Jesse Eisenberg because he’s written three-dozen takes on it. At Sorkin’s version of the Wall Street Journal, everyone up and down the masthead — editors, writers, even interns — insults each other with such relish that someone should be written up by HR. The fast-and-furious dialogue hits its nadir when Madison’s Frances slips Jeff important documents that he can’t even read because she nonsensically starts chattering about the looming coronavirus.

Here’s where you say that this is just how Sorkin writes characters. And here’s where I counter that a movie about how algorithms destroy humanity has to have some credible humans in it, if only to illustrate its own point.

Instead, Sorkin’s protagonist-bots come with bolted-on personality quirks. White’s journalist is a Luddite who would rather be late to his own job interview than use Google Maps. He comes across as so clueless that the audience can barely credit him for his reporting work winning an eventual Pulitzer — he’s just soulful eyes and a cellphone ringtone that tinkles old show tunes.

Madison, 15 years the junior of the real Frances, is too young to convince us that her character truly believes she can turn Facebook into a digital utopia. An ultra-online 20-something, she was a front row witness to Gamergate, yet somehow she’s shocked to overhear about middle-school girls getting bullied on Instagram. Her character wears legwarmers and knit wristlets to the office as protection against the air conditioning, which also serves to emphasize her company’s interpersonal chill.

Yet, bizarrely, the script makes Frances dress like a sex worker whenever she sneaks to Jeff’s hotel to slip him some corporate secrets. It’s a disguise, she explains, although the gag is so forced that it’s just as easy to believe the literal-minded girl is taking her Deep Throat identity too seriously. Or perhaps Sorkin just wanted to remind audiences that this awkward creature is the same actor who won the Oscar stripping off in “Anora.”

A few moments do work, like an opening showdown between a drunk blond (a nasty-great Portia Doubleday) and two cops that gets live-streamed to the web, and Zuckerberg’s congressional coaching sessions with his crisis team, played by Wunmi Mosaku and the comedian Bill Burr. From what we learn of Burr’s Charlie Garrigan, an insider who sold his Facebook stock too fast and then wrote a negative New York Times editorial against the company, he seems to be inspired by early co-founder Christopher Hughes, which would made him the only other callback character from “The Social Network.” But Sorkin has changed his name and upped his age, so as fun and ferocious as Burr is, we also spend his scenes feeling a little confused.

Do we learn anything new about Facebook itself? No. Still, I appreciated how dismissive Frances gets when asked to confirm small scandals that she finds too piddly to care about, like Jeff’s suspicion that Zuckerberg is goosing his posts so that positive comments outrank negative ones 32 to 1. That’s just obvious, her posture says. Facebook is over two decades old and he still hasn’t made many friends.

The vote marks the first time the far-right party gained enough seats to form its own caucus.

France’s far-right National Rally (RN) party and its allies have secured a record 14 seats in the Senate, effectively quadrupling its number in the 348-seat chamber just months before a presidential election.

Sunday’s indirect election ⁠of senators marked the first time Marine Le Pen’s party won enough seats to form its own caucus.

“The results have exceeded our expectations,” Le Pen, the party’s leader and presidential candidate, said in a post on X.

“This is a historic victory, and a major milestone with the formation for the first time of a group in the Senate.”

RN entered the Senate for the first time with two seats in 2014, when it was known as the National Front, and won three seats in 2023.

It emerged as the single largest party in the lower-house National Assembly after President Emmanuel Macron called snap polls in 2024, though it fell well short of a majority.

Le Pen is preparing to run in next year’s presidential election when centrist Macron steps down.

RN president Jordan Bardella said the party’s senators would form an alliance with the Union of the Right for the Republic (UDR).

The right, centre and left-wing Socialists looked set to remain the three major forces in the upper house, according to initial results.