Financial Times
The Financial Times has a media bias rating of Center. The Times is an international newspaper that focuses on business and economic reporting.
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Alain Jocard/AFP/dpa
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Three nights of rioting across France have once again exposed the country’s acute social tensions at a time of growing political polarisation.
The latest protests demonstrate that France’s impoverished, ethnically-mixed neighbourhoods remain a powder keg, riven with a feeling of injustice, racial discrimination and abandonment by the state. The criminal disorder, though shocking, is not yet on the scale of 2005, when more than 10,000 cars were torched and more than 230 public buildings damaged in a three-week orgy of violence. But the authorities understandably fear a repeat.
This week’s unrest, like that of 18 years ago, was triggered by the death of a non-white teenager after a police chase. Different this time is the power of social media to propagate unrest. The far-right is also stronger than it was in 2005. And this time around President Emmanuel Macron and his government have sought to defuse tensions rather than stoke them.