Macron accuses foreign leaders of exploiting French riots

French President Emmanuel Macron has accused foreign leaders of exploiting the riots which erupted across the country on Saturday for electoral purposes.

Without naming them, he said they were campaigning for forthcoming elections "at France's expense" with their comments on the violence, which erupted on the fringe of cost-of-living protests.

Speaking on a visit to the Middle East, he referred to them as "leaders who are in campaign mode, whether here in the region or on the other side of the Atlantic".

It was an apparent swipe at Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who faces parliamentary elections next week, and US President Donald Trump, for whom mid-term polls fall next month.

Macron said the unnamed leaders had been influenced by fake videos generated by AI about the riots.

Nearly 150 people have been jailed and more than 800 brought before the courts since the riots which gripped Paris and other cities including Lyon, Marseille and Nice.

Video of running battles between masked rioters and police, as well as property being destroyed and stores being looted, spread across social media.

The government admitted the police had "lost control" during the violence, which came after weeks of protests by students over conditions in high schools.

Macron vowed afterwards that the authorities would be "uncompromising" towards "agitators from ultra-left fringe groups", which he blamed for much of the trouble.

Speaking in the Qatari capital Doha, the French president said: "For me, there is no visible foreign interference in the events that took place. On the other hand, there was foreign manipulation of information afterwards, yes, and that gave rise to unacceptable and stupid comments from many people, including foreign leaders...

"We had people claiming that we had been invaded by hordes of migrants and Islamists, which is completely false."

On Tuesday, Netanyahu said in an interview for Israel's i24 channel, external that France, which has Western Europe's largest Muslim minority, had been hit by an "invasion of extremist Islam".

He said he had told Macron after the Hamas attack on Israel on 7 October 2023: "If we do not eliminate them here, you will have them in Paris." "That is exactly what is happening," he added.

Also on Tuesday, Trump blamed the riots on mass immigration to France.

"When I look at France, when you look at Italy, when you look at all the turmoil and the hatred, that's not about school," he said. "That's about people coming into the countries that hate the country."

"Close your borders and take control before it is too late!" he said in remarks directed at Macron.

Separately, BBC Verify has traced one of the most viral AI-generated images circulating on social media, which supposedly shows an elderly couple being robbed and left in their underwear in Paris, to an obscure website.

The director of Infos-Israel.News, Sabrina Hania, told the BBC her team had created the image - which was published on 17 October - using ChatGPT without using a reference image.

It was posted shortly after a television journalist reported on the alleged incident, citing "police information". The claim remains unconfirmed, with French media reporting that prosecutors have no information supporting it having happened.

While the original image was labelled as "Made with AI" on X and "AI content" on Instagram, it was later shared on X without any disclaimer in a post which attracted more than six million views.

Hania said she regretted that the image had been taken out of context and had misled so many people, blaming those who reshared it without identifying it as AI-generated.