By Breitbart News Network | Created at 2026-10-19 13:41:14 | Updated at 2026-10-19 19:59:28
11 hours ago
French President Emmanuel Macron on Monday morning refused the resignation of his Interior Minister, Laurent Nuñez, as the nation reels from a weekend of violent riots.
Le Monde reports that Nuñez presented his resignation to Macron on Sunday on grounds that his office exhibited a “lack of foresight” in the adequate deployment of law enforcement to contain the violence that engulfed France.
In his resignation, Nuñez reportedly called for Macron to deploy a “new strategy” to maintain order “in the face of the rioters.”
Macron, however, refused to accept the Minister’s resignation. In a brief statement shared with local and international outlets, the Élysée Palace announced on Monday morning that Nuñez will continue serving as Interior Minister, citing a “need for continuity in the leadership of law enforcement in the current context.”
Speaking with France Inter hours just minutes before the Élysée’s statement, Nuñez confirmed that he had presented his resignation before Macron, and affirmed, “I am responsible for everything that happens on the ground.” The Minister further recognized that there had been a “loss of control” by the police in several French cities during the riots.
“The security measures we put in place were, in some places, disproportionate to the number of participants and demonstrators in normal marches, but also to the number of vandals, looters, and far-left activists who caused the marches to degenerate,” Nuñez reportedly told France Inter.
Per the radio station France Info, the Minister particularly described Saturday as an example of the loss of control and as a day that was “extremely difficult to manage” for law enforcement. Nuñez disclosed that his office had forecasted that “200,000” protesters would participation the violent riots — but by Saturday, “more than 550,000” people took to the streets across France.
“Now, the issue at hand is ensuring that this violence does not happen again,” Minister Nuñez said. “We obviously need to do a better job of anticipating mobilizations as they occur.”
“In certain major cities, when you have hundreds of stores looted, you can’t look at shop owners and say we haven’t lost control,” he stressed at another part of the interview.
According to Nuñez, the French government will conduct a “scaling up” of law enforcement operations against rioters and looters so that security forces can be “mobile and responsible.” The goal, he reportedly affirmed, is to assure that “this does not happen again.”
Paris and other major French cities were once again engulfed in chaos and lawlessness over the weekend, with hundreds of thousands of far-left protesters taking to the streets and committing numerous acts of arson, vandalism, theft, and other crimes — including the destruction of the historic Limoges City Hall building.
The violent riots led to the arrest of over 2,400 individuals and reportedly left over 600 law enforcement officials and firefighters injured.
President Macron finally addressed the riots through a Sunday night address — but failed to acknowledge the role mass migration played in the multicultural riots. As Breitbart News reported, many of the rioters are suspected of hailing from Paris’ Saint-Denis and other multicultural communes.
