France may be opening the door for the next Trump

In 1981, one of the first acts of François Mitterrand, the newly elected Socialist president of France, was to abolish the death penalty. The question France is asking today is: has it come back as state-sanctioned policy?

The video footage of a French police officer shooting a 17-year-old teenager dead at point-blank range through a car window has shocked all of France.

Deputies in the National Assembly held a minute’s silence. The young man’s mother called for a peaceful demonstration, but once again France erupted in anger with 150 arrests last night as police struggled to control the fury of the country’s north African community.

The police had stopped a car at traffic lights, and France saw an officer pull out his gun and shoot dead the victim.

To begin with, the police lied, saying the car was being driven towards officers. However, video footage shows a stationary vehicle with windows down as the killing happening.

To be sure, loud-mouth leftists like Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the leader of the left bloc of deputies in the French parliament, called the police killing “murder”. As during the violent protests against the Macron pension reforms, Mélenchon’s only response to the flames of violent protest is to pour more verbal petrol on them.

But there is a deeper problem for Macron, who arrived as president without any political experience, never having been elected, and being anointed by the Davos liberal elites in France as the messiah of liberal-right reforms which they believed would renew the country.

France needed (and needs) reforms, but Macron has a tin ear for the fears and worries of too many in the country that are excluded from his project.

This is the third fatal shooting this year by police of a French citizen of North African origin. Macron has come to over-rely on his interior minister, Gérald Darmanin – a man who was a former protégé of the disgraced rightist president, Nicolas Sarkozy. Darmanin was poached by Macron from France’s conservative party Les Républicains when Macron formed his first government in 2017.

The French president – like Rishi Sunak, an international banker – had been promoted to high office by the socialist president, François Hollande. Despite having this left background, Macron rejected offers by France’s moderate social democratic left to play a part in his reform project. Instead, he turned to the right, making Darmanin the youngest cabinet minister in French history.

Darmanin makes his UK opposite number, Suella Braverman, look like a wet liberal do-gooder. He has targeted French Muslims mocking halal (and kosher) meat, and looked to ban burkinis worn by Muslim girls and women in public swimming pools.

France has its share of Islamist ideologues who scorn European democracy and insist on the primacy of religious male control of women, as well as anti-Jewish hate. France’s main source of immigration are its former colonies in north and sub-Saharan Africa where autocratic rulers have used Islam as a mean of maintaining control.

Darmanin has tried to close down mosques he has accused of fomenting Islamist ideology. He accused the far-right prime minister of Italy, Giorgia Meloni, of allowing too many immigrants from Libya and Tunisia who arrived on boats in Italy to enter France, and said Meloni “was incapable of handling the immigrant crisis” faced by Mediterranean nations. Italy’s foreign minister cancelled a trip to Paris in protest at the French minister insulting Meloni.

Darmanin has also opposed same-sex marriage and seems to relish ticking every modern anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant, Trump-like political box.

He got into trouble at a UEFA cup final in Paris in 2022 when he falsely accused Liverpool fans of using fake tickets to gain entry into the crowded stadium where they were attacked by French hooligans. The French parliament criticised his lies, but he simply shrugged away their rebuke and continued to enjoy Macron’s backing.

Many feel the French police have taken their cue from their hard right-wing interior minister, and have simply given up on obeying the law when it comes to non-white French citizens.

But this is part of a deeper crisis of Macronism. He has presided over the disappearance of the moderate left and right and instead faces left and right groups in the National Assembly and wider politics that reject compromise, tolerance and a peaceful parliamentary solution to the reforms France needs.

This is a perfect storm for Marine Le Pen, who many in France now see as the unstoppable successor to Emmanuel Macron (who cannot run for a third term as president).

The violence unleashed by Darmamin’s anti-immigrant demagogy – both by police officers who shoot first and ask questions later, and then street protests that have set France on fire – is doing Macron huge damage. Despite this, it does not seem to worry him too much, even as he helps pave the way for Europe’s first fascist-lite head of state.

Denis MacShane is the former minister of Europe who writes on French politics and appears regularly on French TV and radio