Nearly 1,000 Arrested After Another Day of Protests in France

Nearly 1,000 people were arrested in France on Saturday as hundreds of thousands joined another day of demonstrations that ended with clashes in several cities, officials said.

The interior ministry put turnout at about 410,000. Unions counted around 800,000. The protests, over the cost of living and poor conditions in schools, were mostly peaceful until the evening, when police fired tear gas and water cannon in Paris and other cities. Officials appear to have avoided rioting and looting on the scale seen last weekend.

Paris, Marseille, Bordeaux, Lyon

In Paris, trouble began at the end of a march from Porte d'Italie to Porte de Vincennes. Some protesters built barricades and threw objects at officers, and police baton-charged masked youths who were smashing the windows of a car dealership. Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez said several thousand radical activists had gathered at the back of the march, among them around 500 people identified as rioters.

Bins were set alight in Marseille and metal sheets were used to block streets, and a law enforcement vehicle drove through a burning barricade. In Bordeaux, people in dark clothing and face coverings pulled boards off a building to make a barricade. Police used tear gas in Lyon to disperse a crowd in an area the prefecture had put off limits. "There were around 150 of us, mostly secondary school and university students," one protester said. "Then the tear gas came almost immediately."

Nuñez said late in the day that nearly 1,000 people had been arrested and that the figure would rise. Two people were seriously injured, one in Toulouse and one in Clermont-Ferrand. In Orléans, about 13,000 people took part in a peaceful rally against the National Rally party.

About 70,000 police officers were deployed. President Emmanuel Macron had ruled earlier in the week that only demonstrations organised by recognised trade unions would be allowed, and several cities added restrictions. Hundreds of people have been jailed after fast-track court hearings for vandalism, arson and looting.

A protester in Paris who gave her name as Zelie, 26, said people were "really frustrated" and had been "suffering a lot" since Macron took office. A masked teenage protester said: "We really want a change in France."

Last weekend

About 550,000 people took part in last weekend's protests against rising fuel prices and the cost of living, which followed weeks of student demonstrations. They turned violent, with more than 2,500 arrests, and over 2,000 shops and other businesses were directly affected. The Chambers of Commerce and Industry estimated the damage at hundreds of millions of euros. One demonstrator's hand was blown off by a police crowd-control grenade, according to AFP, and about 1,000 police officers were injured. Overnight curfews were imposed in Paris and other cities.

Protests also took place elsewhere in Europe on Saturday. Police fired tear gas at thousands of anti-government demonstrators in Tirana, Albania, there were clashes in Brussels, and hundreds of soldiers backed police in Milan, where a security operation stopped protesters from gathering. The protests come six months before France's presidential election, and leading contenders have blamed Macron and his ministers.

Source: BBC News