Police and protesters have clashed in Paris after rioters set fire to bins and disrupted traffic amid anti-government demonstrations.
At least 132 people were arrested after huge crowds took to the city’s streets in a day of planned nationwide protests by the “Block Everything” (Bloquons Tout) group over widespread frustration with France’s political class and proposed budget cuts.
On Monday, the country’s parliament ousted prime minister Francois Bayrou in a confidence vote over his plans to tame the country’s ballooning debt. This led the president, Emmanuel Macron, to appoint his fifth prime minister in less than two years, choosing a close ally, Sebastien Lecornu, which outraged left-wing politicians.
Firefighters and police were deployed to tackle chaos on the capital’s streets, with protests and traffic disruption also reported on highways throughout the country, including in Marseille, Montpellier, Nantes and Lyon. Nearly 200 people have been arrested across France, according to interior minister Bruno Retailleau.
The protests are being organised by the “Block Everything” movement – a group with no centralised leadership that sprang up online in May among right-wing organisations, researchers and officials said, but has since been taken over by the left and the far left.
They have been compared to the 2018 “Yellow Vest” protests, which initially arose over fuel price hikes but morphed into a broader movement against Mr Macron and his plans for economic reform.
The demonstrations are taking place across France. Mr Retailleau told reporters that around 50 hooded people tried to start a blockade in Bordeaux, while in Toulouse, in the southwest of the country, a fire disrupted train traffic early on Wednesday, though it was quickly extinguished.
He said 80,000 security forces had been deployed, including 6,000 in Paris. French media had reported that 100,000 people were expected to take part in the demonstrations.
“Anger has been rumbling for months, even years,” said Daniel Bretones, a union member protesting in Marseille. “We’re on the fifth prime minister under Macron’s second term, and it has never changed anything.”
It comes after the discovery of a number of severed pigs’ heads – five of which had Mr Macron’s name written on them – close to mosques in the Paris area on Tuesday. It is thought that the incident may bear the hallmarks of previous suspected Russian-linked acts of attempted destabilisation that have targeted France and other allies of Ukraine.
Paris police chief Laurent Nunez said that although investigations are still underway, “we cannot help but draw links with previous acts that happened, often at night, and which later proved to be acts of foreign interference”.
He said the placement of pigs’ heads in the vicinity of nine mosques – four in Paris and five others in its suburbs – appeared to have been “carried out simultaneously, necessarily by several people”.
