Still out of breath after the marche blanche in Nanterre — a solemn procession in tribute to Nahel, the seventeen-year-old shot dead by French police in this suburb west of Paris on Tuesday — La France Insoumise (LFI) MP for Seine-Saint-Denis Éric Coquerel is adamant: “This march was historic: at last, the left-wing activist community was there! Bit by bit, something has happened.” For this historic pillar of LFI, a tireless supporter of social struggles and working-class and marginalized neighborhoods, the parties of the Left have responded to the current riots in a totally different key to their stance toward the riots that broke out in 2005.

Back then, when the banlieues were set ablaze by the deaths of Zyed Benna and Bouna Traoré as they fled from the police, the political class was at best indifferent, at worst totally surpassed by events. While then interior minister Nicolas Sarkozy fanned the flames of youth hatred with talk of “blasting the streets clean,” “scum,” and “zero tolerance,” the Socialist Party (PS) aligned itself with the government’s positions: the priority was the unity of the Republic’s main political forces (it only abstained from voting on the state of emergency).

Even the far left felt “little invested in cars being torched,” sociologist Michel Kokoreff, professor at University of Paris 8 and author of La Diagonale de la rage, told Mediapart. In a 2007 study sociologist Véronique Le Goaziou wrote that the far left had “been conspicuous by its absence during a large part of the riots.” She noted the “silence of far-left groups,” but also “the embarrassment, even cacophony of the governing left (Socialist and Communist Parties),” which had “left the rioters deeply isolated politically.”