00:06Looting, rioting, and entire buildings going up in flames.
00:10These are the scenes that have poured out of France over the weekend,
00:13showing anarchy nationwide, leading to thousands of arrests.
00:17France has been hit with unprecedented riots over the weekend,
00:20as what started just over a month ago as a demonstration at a local school in Paris
00:27over staff shortages has spiraled into nationwide unrest.
00:31We've seen almost 2,500 arrests, thousands of stores looted, hundreds of cops injured,
00:37the destruction of main monuments, including the City Hall in the southern city of Limoges.
00:42Fox News Digital has an investigation out, which alleges that some 54 various left-wing,
00:48environmentalist, communist, socialist, even Islamist organizations
00:53have coordinated some of this unrest behind the scenes,
00:56or have at least been involved in amplifying those voices.
00:58So who you blame for this unrest very much depends on which side of the political aisle you land.
01:03On the sort of far right, you have Marine Le Pen,
01:06who has branded the unrest as a threat to democracy
01:08and called French President Emmanuel Macron a leader without credibility or authority.
01:14On the other side, you have Jean-Luc Mélenchon of the sort of insurgent left.
01:18His party has been partly blamed for fanning this unrest,
01:22or at the very least not condemning it and not condemning the students.
01:24And so there is this sense that, as you've seen in a lot of other countries around Europe,
01:29the more moderate parties of the centre-left or the centre-right are being squeezed out,
01:33and instead you're seeing people on both sides flocking to the extremes.
01:37So what's happening in France has to do with immigration,
01:41not schools, not anything.
01:43It's immigration.
01:44And I told President Macron,
01:47close up your borders.
01:48I told him the first time I met him,
01:51which was years ago in my first term,
01:53close up your borders.
01:54You're going to have nothing but trouble.
01:56And they've got a lot of trouble.
01:58So President Trump, among others,
01:59has blamed this unrest on migrant communities in France.
02:03And there's certainly a sense that if you look at some of the footage of the unrest,
02:09that is the perspective that the far-right are using
02:11as kind of demonstrating this failed migration model in France.
02:15But what seems to be the case is that it's gone far beyond that,
02:19because we are seeing unrest not just in the more historically diverse suburbs of Paris or Marseille,
02:25but also in smaller cities, smaller towns,
02:28various different groups getting involved,
02:30all with their own kind of agenda and grievance.
02:32And so whether that unrest is really as simple as being spearheaded by migrants,
02:37it seems too early to say at this point.
02:39As to what the goal of the protesters is in France,
02:42at this stage it remains somewhat unclear.
02:45As this investigation is found,
02:47there appear to be various different groups of various different causes.
02:50And that seems to be the overriding perspective at the moment,
02:52is that the current unrest in France is an excuse for whoever has a gripe with the current system
02:58to get their point out, or at the very least to be public in the streets
03:01and to hijack the chaos for whatever agenda they have.
03:05So while some of the students may have had valid concerns in the beginning
03:08about staff shortages in schools or overcrowded classrooms, crumbling facilities,
03:14some of the scenes over the weekend definitely appear to have hardened
03:17the general public's view in France about the unrest.
03:20Scenes such as the looting of luxury stores, Apple stores, Louis Vuitton, Dior,
03:25local shopkeepers and ordinary French men and women being attacked by rioters
03:29have kind of turned and hardened that view against,
03:32and again seems to have pushed French politics more to the extremes.
03:35Before the weekend mayhem, the unrest first erupted in France in late September.
03:40In recent years, an influx of students brought on by migration
03:43and a notable 2010 fertility spike, coupled with budget-saving policies,
03:48has left 70% of French public school classrooms with more than 30 pupils per class,
03:53while only 15% of all school buildings in the nation
03:56have been built or renovated in the last decade.
04:00Tensions eventually boiled over, and over weeks,
04:02hundreds of thousands of people protested poor conditions at French schools,
04:06snowballing into some of the most violent clashes that the country had seen in nearly 60 years,
04:11with riots disrupting cities and police making thousands of arrests.
04:15Over 450,000 protesters took to the streets on October 7th,
04:20resulting in at least 2,000 schools being blockaded or closed.
04:24The wild scenes quickly exploded into an international story
04:28and sparked a wave of student activism in other countries
04:31where students became inspired by what they saw.
04:33Major unrest also hit the Belgian city of Liège on October 7th,
04:37and eventually to the capital of Brussels,
04:39as hundreds of students took to the streets,
04:41shattering storefront windows and igniting fires
04:44over rising education costs and overcrowded classrooms.
04:47Several Belgian students told Reuters that they were in touch with their French counterparts.
04:52Clashes followed in Albania on October 13th,
04:55prompted by outrage over education coupled with accusations of corruption
04:59that led to violent protests in the capital,
05:01demanding for the country's prime minister to resign.
05:03After weeks of ongoing protests in Spain over a housing crisis,
05:08on October 14th, students and faculty added to unrest,
05:11facing off with police as thousands of teachers went on an indefinite strike
05:15demanding higher pay and smaller classroom sizes.
05:18And in Italy on Friday, October 16th,
05:21demonstrations erupted in cities across the country,
05:24including Rome, where students marched on the education ministry
05:27and ignited firecrackers at police.
05:29The wave of unrest is not isolated to Europe, however.
05:32In Argentina, thousands of protesters gathered in Buenos Aires on October 15th,
05:37demanding President Javier Mille's government comply with a law updating public university funding.
05:42The massive demonstration saw riot police fire tear gas
05:46as dozens of protesters hurled stones near the Congress building.
05:49While this isn't the first time that protests over these same issues
05:53have popped up in recent months and years,
05:55the scale, intensity and overlap of demonstrations is striking.
05:58We have seen protests across various different countries in Europe.
06:02We've seen unrest now spreading to Italy,
06:04in Albania, Spain, Portugal.
06:07And as to what the one unified cause of that,
06:09it doesn't appear to be clear at this point.
06:10But what you could say is that
06:12there is a sense that a lot of Western European countries
06:15have kind of lost being able to control the narrative
06:17and control the agenda about where the continent goes from here.
06:21And they're almost seeing a kind of Uber crisis
06:24of migration on the southern borders,
06:26soaring prices brought along by the ongoing war in Ukraine,
06:30declining living standards being brought about
06:32by a sort of large welfare state in a lot of these countries.
06:36And that's one thing that has been mentioned,
06:38is that the French government spending accounts for 57% of their GDP,
06:41some of the highest levels in the world.
06:43So there is a sense that there is a lot of European governments
06:46simply don't know how they solve the multitude of crises
06:50that they're facing at one time.
