Police fire teargas as French school protests cause ‘heaviest toll in decades’
STRASBOURG/LYON/PARIS – Police fired tear gas at protesters outside French high schools on Oct 6 as students, teachers and parents took to the streets on the biggest day of what Prime Minister Sebastien...
STRASBOURG/LYON/PARIS – Police fired tear gas at protesters outside French high schools on Oct 6 as students, teachers and parents took to the streets on the biggest day of what Prime Minister Sebastien Lecornu described as the most violent school protests in decades. The protests, in which a teenager lost a hand on Oct 5, were the latest manifestation of public anger in a country where the far right and far left are surging ahead of a presidential election in the spring.
The government is under pressure to tame public debt amid weak growth, and has struggled with basic tasks such as passing a budget since President Emmanuel Macron’s allies lost their majority in a 2024 parliamentary vote . Lecornu told lawmakers at least 215 teenagers and 85 school staff had so far been injured in clashes, “the heaviest toll in decades paid by the school system”.
His office said more than 700 police officers were also hurt. Macron has convened Lecornu and other senior ministers at an emergency meeting on Oct 6, broadcaster BFM reported. In Marseille and Nantes, protesters held up signs reading “The state has killed national education”.
In Toulouse, parents linked arms at the front of a march through the city. In Strasbourg, Lyon, Rennes and Paris, the demonstrations at times turned violent, with police firing tear gas and protesters lighting fires in the streets and hurling projectiles. The Paris police said the clashes there had come about when some 300 people attempted to face off against security forces, adding that the protest was generally unfolding well elsewhere.
By late afternoon they said they were still clashing with a small contingent of people. Three storefronts had been damaged. The protests began in September in the deprived suburbs of Paris, before spreading nationwide.
“There is such a gap between the elites and us,” said Hugo Vetzel, a recent high-school graduate in Strasbourg. The High School Students Union said more than half of France’s high schools were blockaded or would close for the day. Some local education authorities have tried to move classes online.
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Students complain about schools facing basic maintenance problems, from water leaks to rat infestations. Thousands of arrests Rights groups, students and parent groups have accused authorities of using disproportionate force against minors. The government says the protest movement has been hijacked by outsiders and in some places deteriorated into urban violence.
France’s interior ministry said 6,100 people have been arrested since the protests began, the overwhelming majority of them minors. More than 1,800 people are being prosecuted for unspecified crimes, including 1,483 minors, the justice ministry said. A teenager’s hand was blown off as high-school protesters clashed with riot police in northern France on Oct 5.
The regional newspaper La Voix du Nord said the 15-year-old lost his hand and part of his lower arm after picking up a police grenade intended to be non-lethal. “They want to divide the young people into good and bad protesters,” said Omar Slaouti, a high-school teacher in Argenteuil, a northwestern suburb of Paris.
Young people were torching things to make their voices heard, he said, including those angry about being excluded from the education system. “If there were no trash cans on fire, the government would not have stepped back and become aware of the issues at stake. I would add that one can of course regret this but the government alone is responsible for this.” Six months before an election to replace Macron, his government and far-right leader Marine Le Pen’s National Rally party have accused hard-left France Unbowed (LFI) lawmakers and mayors of stoking the unrest.
LFI denies the accusation. “All the young people are in the streets. Everywhere there aren’t police, everything is going smoothly,” said Jean-Luc Melenchon, LFI’s presidential candidate.
Prime minister promises reponse Lecornu has ordered his ministers to tackle the students’ leading demands. Those include ensuring absent teachers are replaced, reviewing the length of the 8am to 6pm school day and the need for longer lunch breaks. The government will also look at repairs needed to ageing school buildings, said Lecornu, who demanded ministers send in their first proposals by the end of October.
Parent Emilie Lhomme said at a protest outside the Helene Boucher school in Paris that the government’s words were not enough. “That’s all fine and dandy, but that’s not what’s going to change the daily lives of our children,” she said. Finding spare cash to implement educational reforms will be difficult.
The government is under pressure to try to narrow a ballooning budget deficit as investor concerns about France’s growing debt, weak growth and reluctance to rein in spending push the cost of borrowing higher. The yield on France’s 10-year bonds briefly hit a 24-year high of over 5% last week.
The surge in French borrowing costs has started to spill into the broader euro area, with the sliding euro currency the latest alarm bell for policy makers. Finance Minister Roland Lescure said on Oct 6 there was no need for the European Central Bank to step in. Le Pen, the far-right euro-sceptic populist leading the presidential race ahead of next spring’s election, set out plans to slash public spending if elected, seeking to establish her fiscal credibility as the bond market crisis deepens.
French spending on education has lagged inflation and the country’s students are trailing their OECD peers in overall performance, data from the PISA 2025 assessment shows. REUTERS
Article text via FreeNewsAPI. Rights remain with The Straits Times.
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