The wave of unrest that began in French schools has spilled across Europe's borders. On Saturday, student-led demonstrations in Albania, Belgium and Italy turned into clashes with police, with water cannons, tear gas and fires in city centres — a week after looting and arson convulsed France.
In Tirana, the Albanian capital, protesters rallied outside the Ministry of Education to demand lower tuition fees, greater state investment in education and the resignation of Prime Minister Edi Rama. The crowds set fire to dumpsters and couch cushions that Rama had placed as a symbolic invitation to dialogue with students, according to Euro News. More than 2,500 police officers were deployed in the capital, where they turned water cannons on the crowd.
In Brussels, police used water cannons and tear gas to break up student-made barricades in the streets. High-end retailers and luxury boutiques across the city boarded up their shops, fearing a repeat of last week's looting and destruction in France. In one incident, protesters attempted to set fire to a pile of rental scooters, road signs and bicycles, but were thwarted by police, Reuters witnesses said. At least five people were arrested, but police said no major incidents had taken place.
Italy on alert
Protests also broke out in Italy, with stores across Naples, Rome, Turin, Bologna, Florence and Milan boarding up their windows in anticipation of the same looting that erupted in France last week. Milan was on particularly high alert, with Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni deploying 500 soldiers into the city along with drone surveillance, railway station checks and rapid-response units.
The unrest has its roots in France. Around 21 September, pupils at a high school in Créteil, a suburb of Paris, began protesting over teacher shortages, classes of 32 to 36 pupils, poor buildings and the national university admissions system. The movement spread fast: by mid-October about a third of France's 3,700 high schools had been significantly disrupted.
A national day that turned violent
On Saturday 17 October, the school movement merged with a national cost-of-living protest backed by unions and the Yellow Vests, the movement that began in 2018 over fuel taxes. The government counted 550,000 marchers nationwide; the organisers counted 800,000. The main Paris march, about 110,000 people, passed without major incident. Then looting, arson and clashes spread through Paris, Lyon, Marseille, Limoges and other cities, and Limoges's 19th-century town hall was largely destroyed by fire.
The Interior Ministry reported 2,397 arrests over the weekend and 997 police officers and gendarmes injured, seven of them seriously. The government said at least 3,000 businesses were damaged. French President Emmanuel Macron blamed the violence on "actions led by radical far-left groups who aimed to bring the Republic down," in addition to criminals who came to loot. Authorities banned some student protests planned for the following days, and night curfews were imposed in some areas of the French capital and other cities.
Why it matters
What began as a dispute over crowded classrooms has become a test of governments across the continent: how to answer students' demands over education and the cost of living while preventing peaceful marches from being hijacked by looters. With Yellow Vest groups calling another day of action for Saturday 24 October and similar demonstrations appearing in several European capitals on the same day, the question now is whether the unrest stays contained — or becomes a wider European movement.
Reporting based on the New York Post, Euro News, Reuters, the Associated Press and French Interior Ministry figures.