Summary
People have also begun marching in the port city of Marseille, France’s second-most populous city. Thousands had gathered for the procession down the …
In Lyon, crowds have set off from Place Jean-Macé, chanting slogans and singing, flanked by rows of police officers. Crowds are also marching in Toulouse and Lille.
Meanwhile protest restrictions remain in place in other cities, where last-minute legal appeals have failed.
In Bordeaux, demonstrators have shown up at the Place de la Bourse despite a city-wide ban and tram cancellations.
“Whether the protest is banned or not, we will support the high school students’ movement and we won’t abandon them. We are parents, we were young once, and we are also workers,” said Brigitte Couderc, general secretary of the CGT-Commerce and Services union in the Gironde region told Le Monde.
In Nice, police said they had ordered the dispersal of a crowd of several hundred people who had gathered at Place Masséna despite all gatherings being banned.
France’s interior minister, Laurent Nuñez, earlier said that there was a turnout of about 35,000 people in marches across the country, compared with 60,000 last Saturday. He said authorities had counted 136 public street actions, down from 264 the previous weekend.
Some are, namely in certain cities and low-income suburbs. Videos filmed by students and teachers have shown leaks, scurrying rats, holes in walls and ceilings, broken toilets and not enough chairs or tables, meaning teachers have to carry them from classroom to classroom. Some children said they had to learn in class while leaks were pouring into buckets, or move desks to avoid getting wet. Many school classrooms experienced temperatures over 35C (95F) in the heatwaves of last May and June.
Estimates in recent years have pointed to thousands of French schools at all levels, both primary and secondary, in need of repair. These include many 1960s school buildings. French regions are responsible for upkeep of high school buildings, but have asked for higher budgets from the government. A senate report has advised that billions need to be spent in the coming years to renovate and repair schools, as well as to address the impact of the climate crisis.
Tens of thousands of people have turned out to the heavily policed demonstrations across France and they have been, on the whole, quite contained so far.
Some sections of the crowd could be seen singing and dancing in Paris as they walked along the route, which was pushed to the city’s fringes at the last minute as police sought to move the march away from the fortified city centre.
In Lyon, police used teargas early on in the banned demonstration to disperse some of the crowd but people were still able to walk on.
In the last half hour there’s also a been of bit of rough activity in Marseille between police and a few dozen people. The French broadcaster BFMTV has shown live footage of masked attendees throwing bins, flares going off and spot fires in the street. There are cordons of riot police around.
Overall though, the heavy policing has appeared to be successful so far in staving off the type of looting, ransacking and violent activity we saw on the fringes of the marches last week. The government has added on 20% more officers, for a 70,000 strong force across the country.
Earlier today, the French interior minister had said protest numbers – at about 36,000 in the morning- were about half of what they were last Saturday.
At the Paris march, Nadège, a communications worker, said she was at Place de la République last Saturday when teargas hit. But that hadn’t deterred her.
double quotation markI’m out again peacefully today to support everyone who is brave enough to demonstrate. It does take courage. People are afraid now.
double quotation markWe have to keep our rights alive. We’ve seen what happens in the US when a bad president is in power. In France, it’s our legal right to protest in the street and I’m here to defend that.
The French president had hosted student representatives for a highly anticipated meeting yesterday afternoon.
Going in, the student leaders had already expressed cynicism over whether the French president would adequately address their concerns.
Pupils in Paris began protests over the quality of their education four weeks ago – and their spirit has since inspired demonstrations elsewhere, across the nation and also into other countries, such as Italy and Greece.
French high schoolers say they’re fed up with the deteriorating state of their school buildings, overworked and underpaid teachers, and packed classrooms.
They’re demanding school renovations and upgrades, better study conditions and the scrapping of the Parcoursup univeristy admissions platform which was introduced in 2018 and has long been criticised for lack of transparency.
Macron held a two-and-a-half hours-long meeting with 20 students.
Nathanael Combary, president of campaign group High School Renewal, said the president had been “attentive” and they would continue talks with Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu on Monday on proposed changes like reform of Parcoursup.
But he and other student leaders called on their peers to continue protesting this weekend.
The radical-left presidential candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon, leader of the La France Insoumise party, is also marching in the Parisian procession.
Speaking to the press earlier he said the protests would continue every week until Emmanuel Macron and his government addressed the public’s demands.
He said Macron “is going to understand that this is going to repeat itself every week” and urged the president, “there is still time for him to concede” to the students’ wishes.
Macron met with student leaders on Friday for the first time since the demonstrations began a month ago. More on that meeting next.
People have also begun marching in the port city of Marseille, France’s second-most populous city. Thousands had gathered for the procession down the Canabière main street.
In Lyon, crowds have set off from Place Jean-Macé, chanting slogans and singing, flanked by rows of police officers. Crowds are also marching in Toulouse and Lille.
Meanwhile protest restrictions remain in place in other cities, where last-minute legal appeals have failed.
In Bordeaux, demonstrators have shown up at the Place de la Bourse despite a city-wide ban and tram cancellations.
“Whether the protest is banned or not, we will support the high school students’ movement and we won’t abandon them. We are parents, we were young once, and we are also workers,” said Brigitte Couderc, general secretary of the CGT-Commerce and Services union in the Gironde region told Le Monde.
In Nice, police said they had ordered the dispersal of a crowd of several hundred people who had gathered at Place Masséna despite all gatherings being banned.
France’s interior minister, Laurent Nuñez, earlier said that there was a turnout of about 35,000 people in marches across the country, compared with 60,000 last Saturday. He said authorities had counted 136 public street actions, down from 264 the previous weekend.
My colleague Angelique Chrisafis has been at Place d’Italie in the French capital.
Many cardboard signs held by demonstrators in Paris referenced the dozens of ongoing inquiries into mutilations and injuries by police weapons in the four weeks since high school protests began.
One 21-year-old student from a Paris science faculty that is currently blockaded by demonstrators, said: “We feel in France that we are increasingly living in an authoritarian regime that is trying to stop our democratic right to protest in the street.”
The thousands gathered in the French capital have begun walking along the designated 1.5km route from Porte d’Italie to Porte de Vincennes.
The metro trains headed to the 13th arrondisement starting point were packed.
The march has been organised by a coalition of unions, the CGT, CFDT, FSU, and Solidaires, supporting student federations, and there are the flags and banners of these various grooups.
But there are also protesters of all stripes – many young people, but also families, office workers, retirees.
Thousands of retired people and others also marched in the Spanish capital, Madrid, on Saturday, to demand that state pensions should be protected.
Pensions have become a key battleground ahead of next month’s snap election, with the Spanish prime minister, Pedro Sanchez, arguing that the conservative opposition Popular party wants to privatise pensions.
Housing and rental costs have also sparked demonstrations in Spain in recent weeks. The September eviction of an 87-year-old woman from her rented apartment in Madrid triggered huge street protests in the capital and elsewhere.
The movement is centered at a tent camp protest that has remained in the capital’s Puerta del Sol square for almost a month.
France’s interior minister, Laurent Nuñez, has said that police have made 135 arrests in relation to the nationwide protests, and seized a variety of weapons.
Weapons confiscated included metal balls, lead pellets, fireworks, slingshots, steel balls, improvised weapons, a katana and airsoft weapons, Nuñez said. He added that, so far, “there has been no major incident”.
An anti-government rally is taking place in the Albanian capital, Tirana, after days of violent unrest in the city.
Protesters have been calling for the prime minister, Edi Rama, to resign since last week, and demanding action against corruption and poor living standards. More than 300 people have been injured in the protests amid clashes with police, with dozens of demonstrators detained and damage to government buildings.
“There is a lot of anger,” activist Sidorela Vatnikaj told AFP, labelling the movement a “revolution”.
“It’s not a matter of only students, it’s not a matter only of environmental struggles ... It’s a matter of the state of rights and state of law.”
AFP is reporting that police in Lyon, south-east France, fired teargas to disperse about 150 protesters near the city centre – where demonstrations had been banned – when they briefly tried to block a road.
A 21-year-old student, speaking anonymously, told AFP: “The police are really mobile ... They come and disperse marches before they even form.”
Demonstrators are on the move in Orléans, where Marine Le Pen’s National Rally party is holding its congress.
Thousands of people are marching, Agence France-Presse reports, shouting anti-fascist slogans and calling for Le Pen to be imprisoned, and for the French president, Emmanuel Macron, to resign. Police put the number of marchers at 11,000, while organisers said 26,000 took part.
The Guardian’s Paris correspondent, Angelique Chrisafis, has been speaking with more demonstrators in the French capital.
Pierre, 60, a retired banking consultant, said he was demonstrating to support young people’s demands for improvements in education.
double quotation markI think young people need to take part in building the future they will live in. I have an eight-year-old granddaughter, I want her to have a brighter future than the sombre times we are facing today. There is a complete refusal by the government to listen to people’s demands and feelings.
Emma, 35, a science podcaster, was protesting for the second Saturday.
double quotation markI want to be part of a mass of people standing up for the schoolchildren protesters and saying the misery of the few is the concern of us all. I feel anger and despair at the rise of fascism and misery in the world and I want people to unite to campaign for something better.
Further student and youth demonstrations across the political spectrum are expected in Italian cities today after major anti-government protests kicked off last weekend.
Like in France, several of those demonstrations at times spiralled into looting and clashes with police.
Prime Minister Georgia Meloni – deeply unpopular with many young people – has deployed 500 extra soldiers to Milan and announced harsher penalties for minors, after major looting there last week.
Police said the ransacking in Milan had involved about 2,000 youths. Police have stepped up ID checks at railway stations and deployed surveillance drones.
In Rome, authorities have also stepped up patrols and shut down luxury shopping strips and are restricting access around the Circus Maximus and Piazza del Popolo.
Right-wing students have been staging a demonstration this morning, in response to largely left-wing protests held last week which railed against Meloni’s government and called for better schools, affordable housing and cost-of-living measures.
An anti-war protest is also scheduled in a few hours time at Piazza della Repubblica.
Source: Guardian World
