On Saturday, my family and I watched from our balcony as CRS riot police confronted protesters and, subsequently, rioters outside the government building opposite our flat. Our exposure was necessarily limited, but the distinction between those who had come to express their dissatisfaction and those who had come to cause violence was quite clear.
The procession itself, the cortège, followed a predetermined route, with people protesting against the cost of living, the state of public services, and much else besides. This was peaceful on all sides. There was no intervention by the police and, from what we could see, no violence from those taking part. People exercised their right to protest, and there was no apparent difficulty in allowing them to do so.
Once the procession had moved on, however, some of those who remained had other intentions. Stones, glass bottles, and eggs filled with paint were thrown towards the police. Fireworks, the mortiers d’artifice familiar from French reporting on urban violence, were directed at officers, who responded with tear gas and flashbang grenades. Fires were being lit throughout our neighbourhood, while the repeated explosions and confrontations created what, from our balcony, felt like an atmosphere of warfare.
It would be inaccurate to describe this as a few objects being thrown at the end of a demonstration. There were people deliberately attacking police officers, fires around us, and a level of violence which bore no resemblance to the peaceful procession that had passed earlier.
I have also seen videos circulating over the past fortnight, purportedly from France, Belgium, and Italy, which appear to show serious abuses by police officers, including beatings of protesters. The circumstances of those recordings require verification, and misconduct requires investigation and accountability. What I saw outside our home, however, was a small and largely reactive force, at times seemingly quite stressed by the violence directed towards it, which fundamentally remained in place protecting the building opposite us. I saw no justification for the attacks against those officers.
Elsewhere, the consequences were more destructive still. In Limoges, the historic town hall was devastated by fire, an attack on a public building whose loss will be borne by the community long after the demonstration itself.
We eventually tried to get some sleep with our metal shutters closed, although our well-insulated home could not keep out the explosions, fire engines, and repeated detonations which continued to wake us through Saturday night and into Sunday morning.
Quite frankly, it leaves one wondering what anybody expects to achieve through this.
For those protesting peacefully, the answer is reasonably straightforward. They want a response to their concerns, whether through better public services, more resources for education, or measures to address the cost of living. One can disagree with their demands, or with the proposed means of meeting them, without finding their decision to demonstrate particularly difficult to understand.
The purpose of the violence is less obvious, particularly when considering the interests of people who may seek to exploit it without having any intention of addressing those original demands. Is the objective simply to cause trouble for an evening, or is there something more durable to be gained?
“Destabilisation” is frequently offered as an explanation, although I find the term somewhat unsatisfactory when it is left there. A government can survive a riot, and a confrontation with the police does not necessarily change anybody’s views on foreign policy. If we are going to discuss the instrumentalisation of unrest, we should be able to explain what the actor concerned might actually get out of it.
There is an important qualification here. The material reviewed for this dispatch does not substantiate a claim that foreign actors organised the recent demonstrations across France, Belgium, and Italy. The research does, however, explain how domestic tensions can serve external interests without those tensions having been created abroad.
In Social identities and democratic vulnerabilities, published by the European Centre of Excellence for Countering Hybrid Threats, Elsa Hedling examines how existing divisions can be exploited to increase hostility between groups, undermine societal trust, and weaken democratic institutions.
My reading of this is that the potential advantage lies in making disagreements progressively more difficult to resolve. A dispute over an education budget can, at least in principle, be addressed through negotiations, spending decisions, or an election. It becomes considerably harder to address when people cease to believe that any of those processes can produce a legitimate outcome, or come to regard the institutions responsible as inherently hostile to them.
That does not make dissatisfaction with government a security threat. It does mean that someone seeking to weaken a state may have an interest in encouraging the deterioration of the relationship between its institutions and the people they serve.
The Institute for Strategic Dialogue’s Behind the Curtain study provides a more specific account of how influence can circulate. Examining Telegram communities in France, Germany, and Italy between January 2022 and February 2024, it traced connections between pro-Kremlin, radical, and conspiracy networks, including the narratives and influential accounts through which those communities interacted.
The people involved need not share the same purpose. Someone may circulate a message because it reflects their dissatisfaction with government, another because it attracts attention, and another because it advances a foreign policy objective. They do not need to agree on very much for the message to continue circulating.
Where operations involve physical acts, the distinction between motives can be equally important. In a February 2026 analysis for the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism, Julian Lanchès and Kacper Rekawek examined individuals associated with Russian operations in Europe, identifying criminal backgrounds, connections to hooligan groups, and links to far-right extremism, alongside identifiable pro-Kremlin convictions. They describe one case in which Russian handlers sought to encourage an attack by falsely telling a white supremacist Telegram group that the targeted house was occupied by people of colour.
The person committing an offence may therefore be responding to money, prejudice, or a willingness to commit violence, while whoever is arranging it has a separate political objective. These findings concern identified operations, rather than the people outside our home, but they demonstrate why an absence of declared sympathy for Russia would not, by itself, settle the question of foreign involvement.
The wider purpose becomes clearer when considering the decisions an external actor might wish to obstruct. The European External Action Service identifies the encouragement of polarisation and the weakening of the EU’s ability to pursue its objectives among the purposes of foreign information manipulation.
In the context of European support for Ukraine, for example, there is an obvious potential benefit in making that support more difficult for governments to sustain at home. It is not necessary to persuade people that the Kremlin is right if enough can be persuaded that their own government’s position is unaffordable or contrary to their interests. An argument about living standards can become an argument against sanctions, assistance to Ukraine, or expenditure on defence, regardless of whether those policies adequately explain the hardship concerned.
People are, of course, entitled to oppose those commitments. The question of interference concerns the use of deception, covert coordination, or manufactured incidents to influence that debate, rather than the mere existence of opposition.
There is another potential consequence of repeated disorder which deserves equal attention: people become more receptive to those promising to restore order.
I find that entirely understandable. Wanting to go about one’s business without encountering violence, to protect a shop from being burned or looted, or to sleep without explosions outside one’s home is a fairly ordinary expectation. People should not have to justify it, and dismissing their concerns as an exaggerated “feeling” of insecurity is unlikely to improve their confidence in those responsible for addressing them.
The more difficult question is what people might become prepared to accept in return, particularly where promises to restore order are accompanied by proposals to give the executive greater discretion, reduce scrutiny, or restrict rights beyond what is necessary to deal with the violence itself. There is a considerable difference between expecting the authorities to enforce the law effectively and accepting that the legal constraints on those authorities are themselves the problem.
Research by Luc Rouban for Sciences Po’s CEVIPOF is relevant here. His analysis of insecurity in France, Germany, Italy, and Poland found an association between insecurity and a stronger demand for authority, without identifying a straightforward or exclusive electoral benefit for the far right. The measure examined went well beyond support for effective policing, including attitudes towards a strong leader unconstrained by parliament or elections, government by experts, and military rule.
This was not a study of the present unrest, and it does not establish that riots cause people to vote for the Rassemblement National, Vlaams Belang, or Futuro Nazionale. It does give us reason to examine the political arrangements people may become prepared to support when they feel that their security is no longer adequately protected.
Parties presenting themselves as more capable of restoring order may benefit, but that outcome is not automatic. The broader opportunity lies in persuading voters that existing safeguards prevent the state from doing its job, and that those safeguards should consequently be weakened.
For someone seeking to exploit unrest, it may therefore be useful to encourage anger against the authorities while also encouraging the fear and exhaustion which make a more restrictive political response attractive. The audiences need not be the same, and neither do the arguments addressed to them.
The Institute for Strategic Dialogue’s analysis of Russian information warfare describes a pragmatic approach in which pro-Kremlin actors amplify groups with conflicting political views where particular positions serve Russian interests. It also identifies efforts to discredit the West while improving Russia’s international standing.
Images of violence can be presented to one audience as evidence of state repression and to another as evidence that the state has lost control. If migrants are then assigned collective responsibility, irrespective of what has actually been established about the perpetrators, a public-order incident becomes material for a much broader argument about borders, national identity, and the supposed collapse of Europe.
The same images may serve a different purpose abroad. Material which encourages European audiences to demand a change of government can be used to persuade foreign audiences that a European government itself is failing, that its claims about democracy and stability are hollow, or that its criticism of other states deserves little attention.
Whether any particular campaign achieves those results requires evidence. The existence of an operation, its intended purpose, and its actual effects should not be treated as interchangeable, nor should an electoral defeat or a change of policy be taken as proof of hostile interference.
For me, the concern is that prolonged disorder can alter both a government’s capacity to act and the terms on which people are prepared to be governed. It can make difficult policies harder to sustain while increasing the appeal of those who promise that fewer restraints on their authority will produce greater security. A hostile actor may find either development useful, depending on the government, the policies, and the interests involved.
The legitimate demand for order therefore deserves a serious response from democratic institutions. Leaving people exposed to repeated violence gives those offering more sweeping political remedies an opportunity which they would otherwise have to work considerably harder to obtain. Equally, the fact that disorder is real does not establish that every measure proposed in response is necessary, proportionate, or likely to work.
Someone who protests for better public services presumably wants the dispute resolved. Someone exploiting the confrontation may have considerably more to gain from its continuation, including from the political reaction against it. That is the longer-term interest worth examining: what the unrest makes harder to govern, what it makes easier to justify, and whose objectives those changes ultimately serve.
