Narco-Politics and Ultra-Left Converge to Capitalise on Racial Unrest in Lille

“Never waste an opportunity offered by a good crisis.” - Niccolo Machiavelli. And the Left has learned to be truly Machiavellian, cf. Rahm Emanuel - You never let a serious crisis go to waste. And what I mean by that: it’s an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.

From The European Conservative

By Thomas O’Reilly

Rioting in Lille has been a surprisingly multiracial affair as white ultra-left radicals capitalised on the chaos on the streets to pursue a vendetta against the Macronist state while nationalists sit in wait.

The repairmen were up early in Lille this week as the post-industrial French city grappled with the racial shockwaves currently striking down the Fifth Republic. A traditional socialist heartland, the nominally white-majority town has seen substantial attacks on government buildings and running street battles between Maghrebi gangs and police—albeit nowhere near the same scale as seen in Paris.

Violence has centred in the southern Moulins district and Wazemmes near the town centre, both areas home to a substantial Algerian diaspora, as Lille’s radical Left threw their weight behind the growing intifada.

The violence in the city has had a remarkable left-wing flavour as street fighters often attached to the ultra-leftist ‘antifascist’ Jeune Garde allegedly joined the ranks of Arab gangs in a bid to fatally destabilise the Republic. 

Freshly painted hammer and sickle graffiti calling for “Justice for Nahel” adorned the walls of Lille alongside Arabic slogans as on-the-ground disturbances had a strong presence of black bloc members riding the current wave of racial animosity within the banlieues. 

For communists, the clashes are a chance to pick up where they left off during the recent pensions uproar and yet another occasion to turn the knife on the beleaguered gendarmerie and Macronist state.

In Lille, unusual for most French urban areas in still having a large white working-class population, the racial geography easily segues from gourmet restaurants catering to tourists to the concrete jungle of the banlieue within a matter of minutes on foot. 

Perhaps the only city in France where you are almost as likely to get mugged by a white drug addict as an Middle Eastern hoodlum, the subterranean world of narco-politics has done much to inform the turmoil in Lille, providing a strata of angry young men keen to take on the law.

Far from avenging the death of Nahel or airing ethnic Algerian grievances against the Republic, I’m told that the reality is that the criminal underworld going toe-to-toe with authorities often wishes to settle a score against a corrupt police force that regularly muscles in on their trade and confiscates drugs only to sell them on at a profit. The daily and underreported machinations of narco-politics provide a ready-made militia for the violence gripping France as mastery over the drug trade and local intelligence networks becomes key to community mobilisation among Algerian ghettoes.

The worst violence in Lille occurred Thursday night during coordinated attacks against various town halls and metro stations as the charred skeletons of car-jacked vans were left littered around the city. Packs of nervous-looking policemen intentionally in groups of four patrolled the Arab districts Friday morning as the sounds of sirens remained a near-constant background noise.

On Friday night, the situation was slightly more subdued in one of the few cities where Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin’s call to arms was able to quell unrest as militarised RAID units battled rioters on Rue Gambetta and other streets.

Far from the typical warzone that many imagine it would be, life in Lille has ticked by unphased as firemen and repair crews frantically went around the city hiding the scars from the previous night’s turmoil.

A cosmopolitan sandwich shop catering to white ‘bobos’ was operating as normal adjacent to a smouldering burnt-out high school as jeering Arab gangs mocked firefighters attending to the building. One could go to Starbucks right outside a rallying point for local gendarmerie freshly equipped with armoured vehicles only to overhear skittish English backpackers wondering if it was time to get out of the cities.

A convoy of Arabs waving Algerian flags did little to perturb a group of climate protestors who were cycling around the city to highlight the relationship with fossil-fuel companies as the unusual racial ecology of the city was made strikingly manifest in one clear moment. 

Before Friday’s disturbances, vans of Arab men circled the suburbs, likely in preparation for the night’s events, as local hooligans gathered in strength on street corners. The protests were not just monoethnic, as partisans from Lille’s socialist underground also mobilised in order to wage war on the apparatus state as mainstream socialist leaders called for reforming the police.

The government is apprehensive to greenlight a proper offensive against the gangs, worried that more bloodshed could only drive a wedge between the banlieues and society at large. One person killed by law enforcement has resulted in this mess, a dozen at the hands of security services could be a recipe for civil war. 

The Macronist regime hopes in vain for the violence to burn itself out and for some form of normality to return to the riot-weary nation. Even if they get their wish, it is hard to ignore that even in a country synonymous with protests, the tempo of France’s national life has been altered.

For nationalists, the carnage is a grim vindication indicating that the beginning of the end for the Republic has begun as mumblings of a potential right-wing institutional takeover move from speculation to the mainstream. 

Similar to during the pension protests, the French Right in the form of Le Pen’s Rassemblement National and Éric Zemmour has shrewdly opted to keep their powder dry and defend the forces of law and order as it moves in to capture the very security apparatus it would need to control in order to rule. Marion Maréchal, vice president of Reconquête, has said, “our duty as politicians is to do everything to prevent civil war.”

Speaking to The European Conservative on the scene in Lille, Anthony Benoit, a local chapter leader with Rassemblement National, says that this week’s “ethnic revolt” is not a flash in the pan but the end result of fifty years worth of poor migration policy aided and abetted by the Left and the liberal state.

“At a certain point, a society has a choice between a final collapse and a revival,” he says, adding that the racial pandemonium has strengthened his party’s hand when it comes to taking charge, as over 70% of the French population say they’d support the army being deployed. In the case of Lille, Benoit describes that the far Left has been active on the streets and has failed to control marauding Arabs as they assisted the chaos.

One wonders what is going through the heads of those in power as France prepares for more nights of violence for the forces of the state to be kicked around by the Arab lumpenproletariat for all the world to see. Is there a point at which it all comes crashing down?

The Macronist experiment to put a bandaid on the Republic’s freefalling race relations and rising crest of Islamism has failed and France and her populists now have the footage to prove it.

Hungary’s and Poland’s denouncement of Western multiculturalism looks far more credible as flames lap around the Élysee Palace while EU leaders meet in Brussels to discuss asylum quotas.

Truth be told, the bottom has truly fallen out of the French Republic and whatever new political equilibrium it comes to following the chaos is anyone’s guess. Whether it’s a Le Pen or Zemmour presidency or right-wing elements in the current government moving to the fore or even the beginnings of Islamic populism, a variety of actors are emerging to enter the vacuum of the post-Macronist space. 

Power is very much lying in the streets in France, it’s just a case of who or what picks it up.