French car-burning returns for New Year's Eve

[Bayleaf]

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-59847372

Why? Just how and why and what is the purpose of this bizarre event?!

[MAD87]

Dog knows, Bayleaf. The awful thing is that they're usually burning their neighbours' cars in the poorer areas where ordinary folk need their cars to get to work. They end up paying top whack for insurance, if they can get it at all.

[Spectrum]

What are the police doing? its disgusting that people behave like this, lots of people have worked hard to enable themselves to buy a car, only for it to be destroyed by brain dead idiots, I know what I would like to do to them

[Blaze]

A destructive element in the French psyche ? A childish reaction when they don't get their own way or don't like something ?
There's no purpose to the burning of vehicles, and they do it because they can.

La Depeche says it's an anti-republican tradition that started in the 1990s. It's increased since the turn of the century to the point where it's just accepted (I'm not sure those whose cars were destroyed would feel the same ...)

Cette "tradition" antirépublicaine est instaurée depuis les années 1990. "Alors qu’il était inexistant jusqu’à la fin des années 1980, ce phénomène a pris de l’ampleur depuis le début des années 2000 au point de s’être banalisé avec en moyenne près d’un millier de véhicules détruits par le feu chaque nuit de la Saint-Sylvestre en France", explique, sur le site de la Fondation Jean-Jaurès, Jérôme Fourquet, Membre de l'Observatoire des radicalités politiques.

[Blaze]

@Spectrum According to Gérald Darmanin, the Minister of the Interieur," La nuit de la Saint-Sylvestre a connu une baisse des violences grâce au dispositif des forces de l'ordre. Merci aux près de 130 000 policiers, gendarmes et personnels de la sécurité civile qui ont porté secours et assuré la sécurité des Français cette nuit"

I very much doubt the police were sitting on their hands .....

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