Paris (AFP)

After twenty months marked by the crisis of "yellow vests", the duo Castaner-Nuñez hands over to the Ministry of the Interior, where major projects remain pending against a background of persistent unease among the police.

Gérald Darmanin was appointed to replace Christophe Castaner and was joined by Marlène Schiappa, Minister Delegate for Citizenship. For the appointments of the Secretaries of State, expected in a few days, "it would be in the order of things that Laurent Nuñez be maintained", according to the Elysee.

"Place Beauvau is the ministry of trouble, not boredom." This antiphon of former Minister Bernard Cazeneuve, Christophe Castaner and Laurent Nuñez has had plenty of time to experience it since October 2018.

Appointed after Gérard Collomb's vaudevillesque departure, the duo formed by a very close friend of Emmanuel Macron and the former head of internal intelligence, an expert in security matters, was to lead a ministry with a roadmap no longer exclusively dedicated to the fight against terrorism. And incidentally reform the electoral map for the 2022 elections.

This included giving substance to the daily security police (PSQ) which, if it had been the subject of announcements under Mr. Collomb, is still considered internally "as an assembly of heterogeneous measures", according to a police officer.

The "yellow vests" crisis has turned everything upside down. The swing of the movement into violence, from November 24, 2018, and Saturdays of riots in Paris and in the provinces, especially on December 1 and 8, dumbfounded the authorities and made maintaining public order a priority. priorities.

Facing the roaring street, repression is sometimes perceived as the only response from the executive. "We do not solve a crisis by tapping on the heads of people, this is not how it works in our country", analyzed with AFP a senior official, a few months after these events.

- Police discomfort -

The accusations of police violence - a term refuted by the executive - have been invited to public debate, fueled by images conveyed by social networks and the injuries of dozens of demonstrators, streaked by shots from Defense Ball Launchers (LBD) ).

This deleterious climate has fed "the blues" of police forces constantly "at the front" since the wave of attacks in 2015, through the challenges of the Labor and Pensions laws, the "yellow vests" or the Covid crisis -19.

This discomfort re-emerged in June. At issue: declarations deemed awkward by Christophe Castaner on racism in the police and the announcement of the abandonment of a technique of arrest, one week after a monster demonstration in Paris organized by the committee Adama Traoré - young black man died in July 2016 after an arrest by gendarmes.

"Castaner has lost the confidence of the police", pings the secretary general of Unité-SGP-FO, Yves Lefebvre. "The problem goes far beyond the minister, we ask President Macron for a Marshall plan for the police," said Fabien Vanhemelryck, secretary general of Alliance.

"There is a degree of resentment towards the politician and the minister rarely reached. Castaner has been exaggeratedly in the culture of the + first cop of France +. However the police officers have the feeling that he lay down before Assa Traoré and that it is no longer legitimate to guide them, "comments Mathieu Zagrodzki, associate researcher at the Center for Sociological Research on Law and Criminal Institutions (Cesdip).

If law enforcement issues have dominated, the terrorist threat has always accompanied the tandem: from the Strasbourg attack in December 2018 (5 dead, 11 injured), to the knife attack in March 2019 of two supervisors from Condé-sur-Sarthe prison by a radicalized detainee, followed by the bomb attack in front of a bakery in Lyon in May (14 injured), then the massacre perpetrated in early October 2019 at the Paris police headquarters (4 dead).

Not to mention the knife attacks in 2020, in Villejuif in January (one dead and two injured) and in Romans-sur-Isère in April (2 dead, 4 injured).

At the end of 2019, Christophe Castaner entrusted the prefects with the mission of fighting against "Islamism, radicalization and separatism".

He passes the hand while the ministry was preparing to make public the new national plan of maintenance of the order and especially the White Book on internal security, supposed to give "the" of the security policy for the next years.

With in the key, a possible structural reform of the police force of which the new minister will have to arbitrate.

© 2020 AFP