Record Arrests in Paris as Unrest Spreads Across Four Countries
Paris police detained 855 people on Saturday, which they say is the highest ever for a single event, within a national total of 1,200 arrests and 150 injured officers. Cost-of-living protests ran the same day in Belgium, Italy and Portugal. The prime minister, visiting officers, said: “It’s a miracle the toll wasn’t higher.”
The spread matters more than the arrest count. Four European countries saw separate and uncoordinated cost-of-living demonstrations on one Saturday: tear gas and water cannon in Brussels and Liège, tens of thousands in Lisbon protesting at wages and housing where house prices have more than doubled since 2017, and in Milan a crowd that emptied the Piazza del Duomo and a luxury arcade, with about fifty detained, many of them minors. In France the destruction is specific. The prefect of Limoges said the 143-year-old town hall was “largely lost”, that “the roof has collapsed on to lower floors” and two-thirds of the exterior had gone, calling it a “catastrophe for heritage” caused deliberately by “a wild horde”. The interior minister blamed opportunists who “had seen a chance to pillage and loot” and said no state of emergency is planned. Turnout is disputed: the interior ministry counted 550,000 nationally while the CGT union puts it higher. A deputy mayor of Paris described “a level of violence that I believe we had never seen before”.