Emmanuel Macron is very angry about the organizational and security chaos at the Champions League final last Saturday outside Paris. According to the government spokesperson, Olivia Grégoire, the Minister of the Interior, Gérald Darmanin, continues to have “all the confidence of the president”, but “his obsession with him is that he be very clear and transparent” in elucidating what happened.
Various media echoed the presidential anger. "You can tell he was furious," a source close to Macron told BFM-TV. The satirical weekly Le Canard Enchaîné learned that the head of state had described the spectacle outside the stadium as “regrettable”, “shameful” and “unworthy of France”.
Faced with the wave of criticism, inside and outside the country, Grégoire had to make a partial mea culpa. He acknowledged that "things could have been done better" and will have to be corrected in the future, but that France's ability to organize major sporting events has not been called into question. Still, he said both the president and the government feel "sad" that 2,700 fans with valid tickets were unable to enter the stadium. The spokeswoman spoke of an "accumulation of factors" that caused the mess, including a public transport strike. She refused to comment on the difficult social environment of the municipality of Saint-Denis, so as not to fuel political "instrumentalization", but deplored the robberies and attacks suffered by fans. The fiasco of the football final focused almost all the questions in the press conference after the council of ministers.
Hours later, Minister Darmanin and the head of Sports, Amélie Oudéa-Castéra, appeared before the Senate Law Commission to give explanations. The former is the main target of attacks. The opposition and part of the press consider him a liar. The newspaper Libération yesterday dedicated the cover to a photo montage in which it showed Darmanin with a long Pinocchio nose. He is accused of putting all the blame on the Liverpool fans and inflating the number of false tickets. Only 2,800 forged tickets were detected at the access turnstiles, while he had spoken of tens of thousands.
Before the commission, Darmanin insisted on the massive fraud (between 50% and 70% of false tickets in the first leak of fans) and said that some valid tickets had been copied more than seven hundred times and sold as good. The minister regretted the incidents, apologized and confirmed that the bad image given is "an injury to our national pride", but he remained firm in his line of defense, on the fraud and on the agglomeration of people due to the railway strike urban RER-B. Darmanin announced that the Spanish and British fans who were robbed will be able to file a complaint in their countries. The French police will travel to Madrid and Liverpool to facilitate the procedures.
The minister advanced that those who ordered the launching of tear gas and pepper spray will be sanctioned, disproportionate measures although, according to him, understandable in a situation that threatened to cause a human avalanche in front of the fences.
