PARIS – Protesters blocked the entrance to the Louvre in Paris on Oct 19, as the French authorities scrambled to stem public discontent fuelling mass cost-of-living demonstrations that over the weekend spilled over into some of the worst street violence in recent years.
President Emmanuel Macron ordered a security review as the country’s interior minister admitted that the police “had lost control” during the weekend’s unrest.
Undeterred, the Yellow Vests movement that organised the weekend’s rallies called for a new round of protests.
Italy, Spain and Portugal, where anger over rising prices has also led to protests, were keeping a nervous eye on the developments after smaller clashes broke out in Milan over the weekend and protests about housing costs persisted in Spanish cities.
Some half a million people turned out across France to protest the surging cost of living, a culmination of four weeks of protests that began with high school students demanding better conditions at their schools.
What started as peaceful demonstrations morphed into violence in some places, as masked groups on the sidelines of the protests attacked law enforcement, broke into town halls and other public buildings, setting many of them ablaze, looted shops, and set fire to cars, bicycles and scooters on the streets.
Interior Minister Laurent Nunez offered to resign on Oct 19 after more than 2,500 people were arrested and nearly 1,000 members of the security forces injured. Protesters were also hurt, with one demonstrator’s hand blown off by a police crowd-control grenade.
“On (Oct 17), in some major cities, you couldn’t look shopkeepers in the eye after hundreds of shops had been looted and tell them we hadn’t lost control,” Nunez said.
Macron refused Nunez’s resignation, even as he acknowledged security and intelligence failures in the government response, despite the some 60,000 law enforcement personnel deployed across France on Oct 17.
Nationwide, more than 2,330 people were taken into police custody over the weekend, 70% of whom were adults, Justice Minister Gerald Darmanin said Oct 19.
More than 2,000 shops were expected to have been affected by the weekend’s violence across France, with damage running into “hundreds of millions of euros”, according to chamber of commerce president Alain Di Crescenzo.
In an address to the nation late on Oct 18, Macron slammed the “unbridled” violence and said the local authorities would be able to ban – “if necessary” – certain rallies in the coming days.
But he stopped short of announcing drastic measures, such as a state of emergency or curfew.
The city authorities in Marseille said on Oct 19 that public gatherings would be banned from noon to 08pm.
Discontent spreads
The public discontent showed no signs of subsiding on Oct 19, with demonstrators blocking the entrance to Paris’ iconic Louvre Museum, the most visited in the world.
“We are proud to announce that we are blocking the world’s largest museum,” read a leaflet posted outside the museum, as management and unions said the protest was led by students from Ecole du Louvre.
Rising prices have fuelled anger in France, where diesel prices have jumped nearly 40% and petrol by 25% since March, and where food prices have risen by 25% since 2021.
The unrest in France has flared just months before a key presidential election where centrist Macron cannot stand again and Marine Le Pen, the far-right presidential candidate for the National Rally party, is riding high in the polls.
Ministers have blamed “ultra-left” groups for the violence, while Le Pen claimed that the party of her far-left rival for the presidency, Jean-Luc Melenchon, has “legitimised the violence”.
The left has accused Macron of ignoring protesters’ demands, while the right is calling on him to take a firmer line.
With costs of living rising across Europe, smaller demonstrations have broken out in other countries.
During the weekend, clashes broke out on the sidelines of a cost-of-living demonstration in Milan, with Mayor Giuseppe Sala warning: “I’m very worried because it’s a new phenomenon, which also originates from an international scenario and therefore feeds itself.”
In Spain, hundreds of tents have occupied Madrid’s central Puerta del Sol square since September, when the eviction of an 87-year-old woman from her lifelong flat sparked nationwide protests in a country with soaring housing costs.
Dozens of tents have also sprung up in Portugal’s main cities of Lisbon and Porto, with protesters demanding action over rising costs of housing. AFP