PARIS: More than 200 people were injured and one person died in Paris following Paris Saint-Germain’s second consecutive Champions League win, the interior ministry said on Sunday (May 31), reviving France’s heated debate about street violence.
A day after PSG beat Arsenal in a nail-biting Budapest penalty shootout, cementing their place on the throne of European football, fans were taking to the Champ de Mars open space near the Eiffel Tower to hail the players staging a victory parade on Sunday afternoon.
But, as last year, the celebrations were partly overshadowed by hefty street violence in the night after the game in which 57 police were injured in Paris and over 400 people taken into custody, a few of them outside the capital, authorities said.
Some storefronts in Paris were destroyed while rioters also torched cars and stands of rental bikes, police said.
There was some vandalism against public buildings in provincial towns such as Orleans, Interior Minister Laurent Nunez said.
Police were not specifically targeted in most places, but one police station in central Paris was the site of brief clashes on Saturday evening, Paris police said.
One young man died following a motorcycle accident amid the unrest, the Paris public prosecutor’s office said.
Nunez, a former Paris police chief, oversaw a huge security operation involving over 20,000 officers, and said the violence had been systematically addressed: “The situation was, overall, under control.”
Politicians from the far-right National Rally, leading in opinion polls ahead of next year’s presidential election, seized on the occasion to reiterate calls for firmer law-and-order policies.
“Only in France does a victory of a football club trigger riots,” said Marine Le Pen, the movement’s leader.
But others highlighted deep social divides as the cause of repeated violence and unrest, saying that those who had wreaked the most havoc were not representative of football fan culture.
“France is living under strain. Society is becoming increasingly brutal. We are a pressure cooker ready to explode anytime,” said Raphael Glucksmann, who is mulling standing in the presidential election on a centre-left ticket.
Last year, similarly chaotic celebrations following PSG’s first Champions League title led to two deaths.