France has surrendered to terrorism. Paris authorities have scrapped the traditional live New Year’s Eve concert on the Champs-Élysées, citing mounting security and crowd-control concerns as the city prepares to ring in 2026.
The open-air concert, scheduled for December 31, 2025, was canceled following recommendations from the Paris police prefecture, which warned that the scale of the event posed unacceptable public-safety risks. In place of a live performance, France 2 will broadcast a pre-recorded musical show filmed earlier at the Place de la Concorde using paid extras to simulate an audience. The annual midnight fireworks display over the Arc de Triomphe will still go forward, and the avenue will remain open to spectators.
The decision marks a sharp break from recent years, when the Champs-Élysées concert drew crowds estimated at up to one million people. Officials say those gatherings increasingly stretched police and emergency services to the limit. One police source summarized the strain bluntly, saying: “Last year, we had more scares in two hours of New Year’s Eve celebrations on the Champs-Élysées than in three weeks of the Olympic Games.”
The cancellation has quickly become a political flashpoint. Bruno Retailleau, a leading conservative figure and former interior minister, portrayed the move as symptomatic of deeper social disorder. “Unfortunately, in France, there is such a turn toward savagery that everything becomes a pretext for violence,” he said, according to The Daily Caller.
Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez has separately warned of elevated terrorism risks during the holiday season, ordering heightened security at open-air Christmas markets nationwide. He has pointed to persistent threats from extremist groups such as al-Qaeda and ISIS, noting that six planned attacks were thwarted in France in 2025.
“It’s obvious that this is the result of massive unvetted Muslim immigration into Europe,” Daniel Di Martino, an immigration fellow at the Manhattan Institute, said. “Western Europe has had a terrorism problem for many years now, and that has been exacerbated because of unvetted Islamic immigration as a result of the refugee crisis of over a decade ago.”
The iconic boulevard has increasingly become a focal point for unrest, with young migrants from Paris’s outer suburbs accused of looting shops and confronting police during large public gatherings.
For decades, the Champs-Élysées has served as the symbolic heart of Paris’s New Year’s celebrations. But recent crowd disturbances during major sporting events and episodes of urban unrest have intensified concerns about hosting massive gatherings on the avenue without extraordinary security measures.
City officials are urging residents and visitors to watch the televised concert and enjoy the fireworks from safer vantage points, essentially begging them to hide from Islamic terrorists and telling them to scrap long held cultural traditions. In effect, the French have said they no longer should be French, lest they upset their new “arrivals.”
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There was a time(revolutionary war) when France came to our aid. Since then they have become the biggest group of liberal losers and quitters in the world. Their cowardice and weakness has made their country and our world much less safe.
France is good at surrendering–they have so much experience.
Will NYC do same for NYE??
Or do so Next year