Daniel Finn su Jacobin Magazine spiega cosa non ha funzionato a Parigi nelle fasi precedenti l’inizio della finale di Champions.

Unsurprisingly, Macron’s government ministers weren’t happy to be confronted with their own reflection, and they’ve responded by blaming the victims and wheeling out discredited talking points. Macron himself said back in 2019 that it was impermissible to talk about “police violence” or “repression” in a country like France: “Such words are unacceptable in a state under the rule of law.”

From this perspective, it doesn’t matter if there were hundreds or even thousands of witnesses, including politicians and police officers from Britain. They must have imagined it when they saw French riot cops using tear gas and pepper spray for no good reason against Liverpool supporters who had been channeled into dangerous bottlenecks on the way to the stadium.

Macron’s interior minister, Gérald Darmanin, claimed there was “massive, industrial-scale and organized fraud.” He suggested that thirty or even forty thousand Liverpool fans turned up at the stadium with fake tickets: “Manifestly, this kind of incident only seems to happen with certain English clubs.” Darmanin also insisted that the use of tear gas was a humanitarian act, “necessary to free up space, so that people weren’t trampled to death.”

The sports minister Amélie Oudéa-Castéra echoed Darmanin’s line, laying great emphasis on the fact that there were no reports of difficulty for Real Madrid fans on their way to the final:

The fact that the Real Madrid club has supervised the coming of its supporters to Paris to such an extent, by scheduling buses from the airport and organizing everything from start to finish — which contrasted sharply with what the Liverpool club did, letting its supporters out in the wild — made a huge difference.