France braces for day of school blockades and union-led street protests

France braced on Tuesday for a day of nationwide high-school blockades and trade union-led street protests in support of students demanding that President Emmanuel Macron’s cash-strapped government tackle understaffed and dilapidated schools Reuters.

Teenage students stood on barricades made of trash cans in front of schools from Lille in the north to Marseille in the south, and from Strasbourg in the east to Nantes in the west. In Paris they held up banners reading “We want to be heard, not teargassed” and “Our future is not optional”.

Tuesday’s demonstrations follow a fortnight of protests which began in Paris’s deprived suburbs before spreading across the country. The government responded with riot police, saying the movement had morphed into urban violence. On Monday, a teenager’s hand was blown off as high-school protesters clashed with riot police in northern France; Pas-de-Calais prefect François-Xavier Lauch declined to comment on the exact circumstances, saying some 200 to 250 protesters had been hurling objects at police, while regional paper La Voix du Nord said the 15-year-old lost his hand and part of his lower arm after picking up a police dispersal grenade.

Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu has ordered his ministers to tackle the students’ leading demands — ensuring absent teachers are replaced, reviewing the 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. school day and the need for longer lunch breaks — and demanded first proposals by the end of October. The government would also look at repairs needed to ageing school buildings.

France’s Justice Ministry said 5,060 people have been arrested since the protests began, with 87% of them minors; more than 1,800 are being prosecuted, including 1,483 minors, and 790 cases have been dismissed. At least 715 police officers and 215 teenagers have been injured in clashes, according to Lecornu’s office.

The protests pile pressure on a government trying to narrow a ballooning budget deficit: the yield on France’s 10-year bonds briefly hit a 24-year high of over 5% last week. Finance Minister Roland Lescure said on Tuesday there was no need for the European Central Bank to step in.

Six months before an election to replace Macron, his government and the far-right National Rally have accused hard-left France Unbowed (LFI) lawmakers and mayors of stoking the protests; the LFI denies it. Bally Bagayoko, the LFI mayor of Saint-Denis, said he opposed violence but stood beside the protesting students: “I stand by being on the side of my residents, and high school students are my residents.”

Sources

• Reuters — France braces for day of school blockades and street protests