Speaking in Doha at the end of a Gulf tour, France's president tore into foreign leaders — Donald Trump among them — for blaming migrants for the weekend riots in France and for repeating fake AI-generated images of unrest that never happened.
Emmanuel Macron said there was "no visible foreign interference" in the riots themselves, but there had been "foreign manipulation of information" in the aftermath, "which has led to comments that are as unacceptable as they are stupid, from many people, including foreign leaders." Asked by a reporter whether he was referring to Trump, Macron replied: "Among others."
The American president has spent days using the French violence on the campaign trail, telling voters to "just look at France," warning that "Paris is going to be a Muslim city very soon," and urging Macron to "close your borders and take control before it is too late." Israel's Benjamin Netanyahu blamed an "invasion of extremist Islam" on Tuesday, and Vice President JD Vance wrote that Western liberals "imported the third world into France." Macron answered the whole line of attack at once.
"We've seen AI-generated images depicting scenes that never actually happened in France. We've had people claiming that we were invaded by hordes of migrants and Islamists, which is completely false."
The unrest itself grew out of protests over the cost of living — fuel, food and underfunded schools — and Macron conceded the protesters' demands are legitimate, promised his government will meet them and "address the root causes, but separate them from violence," and vowed that anyone planning disorder at further protests called for Thursday and Saturday "will be prevented from doing so." France's foreign minister, Jean-Noël Barrot, said Paris can give the governments concerned the facts "to help them avoid spreading or amplifying false information."
The fight lands at a loaded moment: two weeks before America's midterm elections, with Trump campaigning on France as a warning, Macron accused leaders "in the middle of election campaigns" of "using our country for their own political campaigns." The same Gulf trip produced the practical half of his answer to the riots — nearly 295,000 extra tonnes of diesel a month, more than 10% of France's consumption, secured from the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia to attack the fuel prices that lit the fuse. He closed with the line that summed up the whole briefing: "All the people who are speaking ill of our country right now are people who don't love our country. So those people really bother me."