Violence in France: An Interior Minister on Call

French Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez asked for his dismissal “because I am responsible for everything that happened.” The 62-year-old interior minister said on the radio. He admitted that the police forces at the weekend were not sized for the high number of rioters and looters. “We have partially lost control,” he said. President Emmanuel Macron, however, did not grant the resignation request of his interior minister. Nuñez is following in the footsteps of Macron’s first Interior Minister Gérard Collomb, who had to remain in office for several months after his resignation request because the president did not want to appoint a successor. Unlike the socialist Collomb, Nuñez never considered himself a politician. He reacted to the fierce criticism of the police deployment strategy like the top serviceman of the policemen: He took his troops in protection, but did not formulate a political declaration. “No, I will not apologize to the protesters who complain about police violence,” Nuñez said. On Monday evening he travelled to Marseille, the hardest hit metropolis in Paris. Nuñez originally wanted to become a policeman Nuñez also defended the curfews necessary for the restoration of public order. Unlike the German Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt (CSU), he did not make a political classification of the unrest. Nuñez urged to distinguish between two groups. There are rioters and looters with an often criminal background and supporters of the ultra-left, who were mainly targeting town halls. Nuñez, father of two adult daughters, looks back on a career as a top official. From 2022 until his appointment as Interior Minister in October 2025, he served as police prefect in Paris and coordinated security arrangements during the 2024 Summer Olympics. As State Secretary in the Ministry of the Interior, he experienced the often violent Yellow Vest protests in 2018/19. Between 2020 and 2022, he headed the most important domestic intelligence service DGSI. Nuñez comes from a Spanish family who emigrated to Algeria in the 19th century. After the independence of Algeria, the family settled in Bourges, where Nuñez was born in 1964. The son of an architect and a teacher wanted to become a policeman, but then studied law and finally graduated from the elite factory Ena. As a sub-prefect in Bayonne in the Basque Country, he gained first experience in the fight against terrorism. In Marseille, where he served as prefect from 2015 to 2017, he fought against the gang war of drug traffickers.