Students and teachers march in France on biggest day of high school protests

PARIS: Students, teachers, and parents marched in cities across France on Tuesday, and protesters blockaded hundreds of schools, in the biggest day of action in a wave of demonstrations demanding the government tackle understaffed and dilapidated classrooms.

In Marseille, Nantes, and Lyon, the street protests began peacefully mid-morning, with the largest demonstration expected in Paris in the afternoon.

Youngsters held aloft smoke flares and placards reading “Under our school books, anger” and “Where are the politicians? Do they even know we exist?”

Tuesday’s demonstrations come after 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 now morphed into urban violence.

A teenager’s hand was blown off as high-school protesters clashed with riot police in northern France on Monday. François-Xavier Lauch, prefect of Pas-de-Calais, declined to comment on the exact circumstances, saying some 200 to 250 protesters had been hurling objects at police.

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 dispersal grenade.

The High School Students Union said 1,800 high schools were blockaded or would close for the day. Some local education authorities have tried to move classes online. The education ministry did not immediately make numbers available.

“When the answer is violence, it means democracy is no longer working,“ said Hugo Vetzel, a high school leaver in Strasbourg now taking classes for the entrance exams to France’s top-tier universities. “There is such a gap between the elites and us.”

Prime Minister promises a response

Prime Minister Sebastien Lecornu has ordered his ministers to tackle the students’ leading demands. Those include ensuring absent teachers are replaced, reviewing the length of the 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. school day and the need for longer lunch breaks.

The government would also look at repairs needed to ageing school buildings, said Lecornu, who demanded ministers send in their first proposals by the end of October.

But finding spare cash will be difficult.

The protests have piled pressure on a government trying to narrow a ballooning budget deficit as investor concerns about France’s growing debt pile, weak growth and reluctance to rein in spending push bond yields 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 Tuesday there was no need for the European Central Bank to step in.

Marine Le Pen, the far-right euro-skeptic 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.

Thousands of arrests

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, including 1,483 minors, the justice ministry said, without specifying the crimes.

At least 715 police officers and 215 teenagers have been injured in clashes, according to Lecornu’s office.

Six months before an election to replace Macron, his government and Le Pen’s National Rally party have accused hard-left France Unbowed (LFI) lawmakers and mayors of stoking the protests. The LFI denies the accusation.

Bally Bagayoko, the LFI mayor of Saint-Denis, a poor Paris suburb, 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,” he said.