French sovereigntist Presidential candidate Marine Le Pen has diagnosed state power collapse being observed in real time in France, as she tells the public they have “an extremely important choice to make” in the forthcoming elections.
The fact the French state failed to anticipate the obvious of Saturday’s riots becoming radically more violent than those that came before is just another symptom of state power slipping through the fingers of the government, says opposition leader and would-be next President Marine Le Pen. Because the government has lost control of so many of its responsibilities, through both incompetency and blinding ideology, the nation is left in a state of chaos, Le Pen blasted in discussion with broadcaster Franceinfo.
Marine Le Pen, President of the Rassemblement National parliamentary group, attends a session of questions to the French government at the National Assembly in Paris, France, on October 20, 2026. (Photo by Telmo Pinto/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
She said: “The government has lost control of everything. it’s chaos. It’s migratory chaos, it’s security chaos, budgetary chaos”. Stating she wouldn’t even need new laws to calm the country, but would merely be unafraid to deploy what’s already on the statute book with determination, Le Pen pitched herself to the people as the candidate for order.
She said: “I am the one who would give the orders that were not given to the police. I am the one who will mobilise”. Police morale is low because “they are being blamed” for failing to keep control of the streets, she said, whereas the actual culprit is the French government failing to back them up and failing to issue clear orders to keep the peace.
The French government has already admitted it was too slow to react on Saturday and in some cities lost control of the streets. Observing a break down of state control, Le Pen said:
I have the feeling that we are facing a state that is collapsing, we are facing a dying power, a waning administration that has lost its grip, can no longer maintain control, fails to anticipate events, and is, in part, mired in ideological denial.
What happened on Saturday was predictable in the sense that for years and years we have seen these developments unfold at almost every protest that is organised. [There are] far-left rioters besides looters from the suburbs… in six months the French people will have an extremely important choice to make. Do we continue this unending degradation or do we take back control and protect the French people.
Macron’s government has now belatedly shown its teeth, enacting targeted local curfews in several cities, with the appearance of spotlight-searching police helicopters beating across the skies of Paris eliciting comment. Yet these blanket measures — shutting down a whole city at night — impacts the whole of society, most of whom are totally innocent of rioting. Reflecting on this, Le Pen asserted she would take far more targeted and effective steps to calm riots, thank simply locking the whole country up.
“I am not at all sure the helicopter in the skies over Paris has any effectiveness whatsoever”, she said, stating that her government would instead prevent hard-left extremists — the “foreign black-bloc rioters, those who come from Germany, the Netherlands, or Italy” from entering the country to cause trouble the night before every protest. The French government has extensive “dossiers” on all these extremists, she said, and the government monitors black bloc rioters under the S-file system of tracking known terrorism threats.
Using this intelligence and actually acting on it, by blocking such individuals from day tripping to France for riots would help prevent 2quasi-insurrectional protests” that is their “objective”.
The French state is already admitting the extremist fringe of the hard left involved in the worst of the violence are engaged borderline ultra-leftist terrorism. After the fire that burnt down Limoges city hall on Saturday, the investigation was handed to specialist counter terrorism prosecutors, and key figures including prominent mayors have spoken of a network of ultra-left urban warfare training camps from which this deliberate attack sprung.
These networks are not divorced from the mainstream political left either, Le Pen said, stating that an “ecosystem” surrounding hard-left Presidential hopeful Jean-Luc Melenchon. She told French television:
…there is an ecosystem. The French people need to know. There is an ecosystem of associations that are subsidised, financed, by the money of French taxpayers who so struggle to pay their taxes.
This is a myriad of politicised far-left associations… I think public subsidies, whether municipal, departmental, regional or national must not go to politicised associations. Only apolitical associations should be able to receive state subsidies, subsidies from the French people who themselves are extremely diverse in their political opinions, we must stop the subsidising of political associations.
