France riots ‘echo’ in Switzerland: What has happened, where, and why?

President Emmanuel Macron was scheduled to meet with the leaders of French Houses of Parliament on Monday (July 3), and with the mayors of French towns and cities on Tuesday. What's the situation in France's neighbour Switzerland?

Police officers patrol in front of the Arc de Triomphe on the Champs Elysees in Paris, Saturday, July 1, 2023. (AP/PTI)

4 min readNew DelhiJul 4, 2023 10:54 AM IST First published on: Jul 3, 2023 at 04:20 PM IST

Several shop windows and a shop door were smashed in the city of Lausanne in Switzerland over the weekend in what police said was an “echo” of the riots in next-door France, media reports said.

Seven individuals, most of them teenagers, were detained, the AP reported, quoting a statement issued by police on Sunday (July 2).

So are the riots in France spreading outside the borders of the country?

As of now, the incident in Lausanne appears to be isolated and a one-off. There were no incidents in other Swiss cities, and the night of Sunday-Monday was calm.

No further incidents have been reported in Brussels either, where about a dozen people were detained after incidents of arson on June 29 night.

France itself was calm on Sunday night. French media reported 49 arrests through the day, quoting government data, which was much less than the 719 people arrested on Saturday, and about 1,300 on Friday (June 30).

President Emmanuel Macron was scheduled to meet with the leaders of French Houses of Parliament on Monday (July 3), and with the mayors of French towns and cities on Tuesday.

Explained | Why has France been engulfed by protests – again?

The grandmother of the 17-year-old whose killing by police triggered the rioting has issued a public appeal for calm, which commentators have said has helped in the ebbing of the violence.

Why did the violence in Switzerland take place, then?

Around 100 mostly young protesters gathered in the centre of Lausanne on Saturday night and threw stones and at least one Molotov cocktail (a tool of arson typically made by filling a bottle with a flammable liquid like petrol, and thrown at buildings or law-enforcement officers after lighting the wick), media reports said, quoting police.

“Echoing the events and riots raging in France, more than a hundred youths gathered in central Lausanne and damaged businesses,” the Lausanne police said.

The Telegraph quoted a Lausanne police spokesperson as saying: “Quite clearly, what emerges from what we have seen is that these young people during the night were inspired by the situation in France.”

According to police, the violence began after calls on social media. President Macron had earlier blamed content on social media for the rioting in France.

We have seen violent gatherings organised on several [social media platforms] — but also a kind of mimicry of violence,” he was quoted as saying on Friday. Macron had said the young rioters were “living the video games that had intoxicated them”, and called on social media platforms to be “responsible”.

And who were the rioters in Lausanne?

The AP report said three girls and three boys were detained, all between the ages of the 15 and 17 years. They were of Portuguese, Somali, Bosnian, Swiss, Georgian, and Serbian citizenship. The seventh detainee was a 24-year-old Swiss man, the report said.

The police statement described the rioters as “aggressive, hooded youths throwing cobblestones and a Molotov cocktail”, The Telegraph report said. No police officers were injured in the attacks.

Lausanne is in western Switzerland, which is adjacent to eastern France — in a part of the country known as Romandy, where more than a fifth of the Swiss population lives, and French is spoken.