Former special advisor to France’s interior ministry Hugues Moutouh has accused the left-wing political establishment of complicity in the violence raging through the country’s migrant-dominated suburbs. 

Mr Moutouh, who served as France’s youngest ever district prefect, slammed the left wing political class for “justifying” the rampant criminality that’s setting the suburbs ablaze, by their insistence that young thugs should be seen as victims. 

“Again and again the same scenes of urban violence, the same images of cars burned, attacks of police stations, Molotov cocktails launched on the forces of order,” Mr. Moutouh wrote in a piece published by Le Figaro. 

According to the government advisor and lawyer, who has written extensively on how the Republic can improve its security policy, “parts of the French political class on the left” have become “accomplice[s]” to the youths laying waste to suburbs in the country’s cities. 

“Hopelessly smitten with idealism and naivety on the topic of security, the rancid left sees every suburban youth who’s known to the police and has a foreign background as a victim of the system,” he says. 

The former advisor is particularly scathing about the response from France’s major centre-left party to violent suburban youth, stating: “Socialists do not yet speak of [the riots] as an act of ‘resistance’, but they are not far off.” 

If elected in April socialist presidential candidate Benoit Hamon, who has called discrimination “the cancer of the Republic”, has promised to establish non-white “community police” forces in migrant suburbs on the presumption that white police officers are “guided by their racial prejudices”. 

Such policies, according to the former special advisor, suggest Socialists have taken “perverse theories” from the far left of American academia as their inspiration for how to respond to suburban violence. 

“Police are there to question thugs, not to play big brothers Mr Moutouh writes, describing left-wingers as “sorely lacking in common sense”. 

“Public utilities, schools, and police stations are routinely ransacked” in riot-hit districts of French cities, which the author describes as “blighted by gangs whose violence is more than a match for their American counterparts. 

“When questioned, their members are being immediately released.  They no longer fear the police and now hesitate less and less to violently attack [the state].” 

Driving this destruction, Mr. Moutouh insists, is “the laxity of the criminal justice system, which enables thugs to act with impunity”. 

Liberal responses such as “providing more care and support to juvenile delinquents” have “proved ineffective”, according to the author.  He warns that “voters will no longer be satisfied with the same old policies”. 

Instead, if the establishment is serious about preventing the populist Front National candidate from gaining power, it must work to restore authority to police and “counter the relativistic ideology” of the left. 

“The best way to prevent Madame Le Pen from reaching the Elysee one day, is to deal with the problem which nourishes her popularity,” Mr. Moutouh concludes. 

French presidential candidate Marine Le Pen accused the government of inaction in the face of the wave of destruction in Paris, which she said has put France “in a state of emergency”. 

“What good is it if the government refuses to use the means at its disposal to maintain public order and enforce the authority of the state?”  the Front National leader asked.  She declared: “Security is not a privilege but a fundamental right that must be restored for all French people”.