The security problems now facing Emmanuel Macron, France’s new president

Emmanuel Macron emerged from one of the most brutal and eventful election campaigns in recent European history as France’s next president. This was a campaign in which France’s domestic security, in the shadow of repeated terror attacks, was never far from the center of broader debates about France’s future.

Macron has promised to increase security spending, strengthen internal security services and introduce new centers to integrate people returning from fighting for so-called Islamic State. But solving the riddle of France’s recent security woes is going to require wide-ranging action and reform. This will present the new president with one of the biggest challenges of his presidency.

The complex, bureaucratic and disjointed French intelligence services need reform. Macron has remained fairly silent on specific proposals to change the way they work, promising instead to increase defense spending in more abstract terms. This will not deal with the ineffective and overly complex “S-list”, a system for monitoring security threats. Over its history, the list, created in 1969, has contained over 400,000 names, including organized crime figures, anarchists and ecologists, as well as terror suspects. Being placed on this list, however, does not come with automatic obligations for the authorities to monitor or sanction a particular individual.

Policing the banlieues
Reforms are also needed to French policing, particularly in the banlieues, the poor suburban estates that ring French cities. These suburbs are not hotbeds of Islamic extremism as some have claimed but rather are in the grip of their own security crisis. While France has extremely well-equipped police forces, their practices in policing the banlieues is an Achilles heel. Macron has promised an extra 10,000 police jobs but without a change of tactics this will make little difference to the day-to-day realities of insecurity.

From my research in urban and suburban areas in France, I’ve seen a pattern emerging where the police are seen as an “all or nothing” presence. On a daily basis, the police are markedly absent from the cités, the large housing blocks in the banlieues. Petty crimes go unreported, and when reports are made to the police – if the victim lives in the “wrong” area – they are unlikely to turn up.