French President Emmanuel Macron hit back at foreign leaders who weighed in on last weekend’s riots in France, accusing them of campaigning for their own elections at France’s expense with comments he called unacceptable and even stupid.
Speaking from Doha during a visit to Qatar, Macron did not name names directly but pointed to “people who campaign at France’s expense, leaders who are in campaign mode, whether here in the region or on the other side of the Atlantic,” widely read as a reference to US President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Macron denied that foreign interference played a role in sparking the unrest, while criticizing what he described as foreign manipulation of information around the riots that he said led to a wave of similarly unacceptable and stupid commentary from international figures, including other heads of state.
Trump, currently focused on the US midterm campaign, has pointed to the French unrest as evidence of what he characterizes as the dangers of immigration and a broader decline of Western civilization, making unsubstantiated claims that Muslim migrants were responsible for the violence and urging Macron to close France's borders.
The exchange adds friction to an already uneasy relationship between the two leaders, with Macron's remarks signaling frustration that a domestic crisis in France is being used as a political talking point abroad rather than treated as a matter for French authorities to address.
The dispute is likely to remain a point of tension between Paris and Washington in the near term, particularly as Trump continues to invoke the unrest on the US campaign trail ahead of the midterms.
