Students, farmers and the Yellow Jacket movement are taking to the street, calling for a “convergence of struggles.”
PARIS — A wave of nationwide protests in France on Saturday has been marked by violent clashes between demonstrators and police as several hundred thousand people are expected to march throughout the country.
Media reported incidents in the country’s largest cities including Lyon, Bordeaux, Marseille and Paris. Dozens of rioters clashed with law enforcement on the capital’s Place de la République, next to a much larger number of demonstrators gathered for an authorized march that started from Paris’s central square.
Footage showed Lyon’s tourist board office engulfed in flames on the city’s Place Bellecour. A police station was vandalized in Marseille, where a group of “rioters” also entered city hall, Mayor Benoît Payan said. He told BFMTV that “damage was objectively fairly limited,” although the act of vandalism was “unacceptable.” The headquarters of right-wing TV channel CNews in Paris was also targeted, authorities said.
More than 160 people had already been arrested across the country by midday, Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez’s office told reporters.
Students, farmers and members of the Yellow Jacket movement, among others, were slated to take to the streets on Saturday in a “convergence of struggles” to protest raising living costs, sluggish wages and deep disagreements with the government.
The government was expecting “a fairly large turnout,” Nuñez said on Friday.
Saturday’s demonstrations originated in the student protests that began last month with school blockades and calls for better studying conditions, more teachers and more funding. The movement has since spread nationwide — and become a political issue as the campaign for next year’s presidential election heats up.
The government has struggled to deal with the crisis — which Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu described as “urban violence” — and is hoping the student movement will now fade because of a two-week school holiday that started Friday evening.
“The mobilization is marked by a very strong involvement of the ultra-left movement, which is only looking to cause disorder,” Nuñez’s office said Saturday, adding that the minister reiterated his “instructions of utmost firmness” to local prefects and police forces.
The government has defended the law enforcement response to the student protests despite numerous allegations of police brutality, including incidents that left one teenager with a severed hand and another blind in one eye. Nuñez said the use of “stun grenades” was authorized on Saturday, after a temporary ban on their use against students.
While far-left presidential candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon is backing protesters, far-right leader Jordan Bardella pledged support for the police.
Mélenchon criticized the media for only showing violent clashes while “everything is proceeding peacefully, with tens of thousands of people calmly taking part.”
However, Bardella said on Saturday that protests were only made up of “chaos professionals,” adding: “As we said, working France, which is taking the full brunt of inflation and cost-of-living struggles, did not take to the streets today.”
The police and protesters clashed in other European countries on Saturday, too. A student-led protest against corruption and unemployment in Albania’s capital Tirana reportedly turned violent, so did another one in Brussels.
This is a developing story. Victor Goury-Laffont contributed reporting.