The plan behind the France and Italy unrest: social control

The unrest in France and Italy and the end nobody says out loud

Paris wakes up to boarded-up shop windows and 70,000 officers deployed. Marseille counts the damage. The French ten-year bond tops 5% and the risk premium hits 2011 highs. Against that backdrop runs the thesis of the least forgiving analysis: the riots are not a spontaneous outburst, but an operation with a goal that is rarely named. It is not war against Russia. It is control.

The sequence repeats with textbook precision. First, street chaos. Then, a fed-up public demanding a firm hand. In the end, more restrictive laws applauded from the balcony. Thesis, antithesis and synthesis, as one of the most widely circulated takes sums up: politicians come out stronger and people more defenceless. Vandalism would not be the problem, but the pretext.

Why are cars being burned right now?

The timing is no coincidence. In France, the visible trigger is the mass protests and the lockdown of cities. In Italy, the focus is on the rise of parties that have spent years capitalising on insecurity. Some argue the agitation is tolerated from above and that anonymous organisers inflate the perception of chaos with automated accounts. The outcome is the same: the policy debate is shut down and all that remains is "us or chaos".

The economic argument reinforces the suspicion. There is no money for pensions or civil servants, the refrain goes, and the welfare state frays as energy declines. Without abundant, cheap energy, social democracy is no longer sustainable. The question is whether the elites are applying the plaster before the wound, or inflicting the wound to justify the plaster.

Total control and the disappearance of cash

The piece that completes the puzzle is money. Once cash is eliminated, part of this analysis holds, control will be total and the excuse will already be served. Add to that the technology: the Pentagon has reportedly authorised testing a non-lethal heat-ray weapon on the southern border. Security as a cover story, antiestéticar as currency.

Scepticism, however, is not unanimous. Some believe the public has already burned through too much credibility since the pandemic and that an operation like this would be the final nail. A combative 15% or 20% is enough to turn the tables, the argument goes. The battle would not be fought in the street, but by undermining the narrative.

The prediction, with reservations

If the script holds, the outcome will not be a war against Russia —no one is going to send 500,000 troops to Ukraine— but a more authoritarian regime under the pretext of security. The prediction comes with reservations: the same elite that designs the chaos may have lost control of the artifice. And there, precisely, lies the risk nobody rules out.