Street protests sweeping Europe are expected to spread to Germany and reignite in France on Saturday, with police mobilised to stop potential looting and rioting on the fringes of what organisers hope will be peaceful rallies.
Weeks of, at times violent, student demonstrations have rocked Italy, Spain, Portugal, Albania and France, where activists on Halloween have again called for people to make their anger over the cost of living and deficient public services felt across the country.
In Germany, a loose alliance of groups called Gen Z regelt (Gen Z is sorting it) has called for supporters to turn out in more than 30 cities demanding more spending on schools, climate protection and housing, and against any plans to return to mandatory military service.
Alexander Throm, of the ruling conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) parliamentary group, wrote in the Handelsblatt business newspaper: “Scenes like those in France must be prevented at all costs.”
But Felix Banaszak, the co-leader of the opposition Green party, cautioned against attempts to place the youth protests under general suspicion in advance.
“The [CDU’s] rhetoric, which seeks to criminalise these protests pre-emptively and paint them as the work of marauding gangs, may even drive people towards radicalisation,” he told the RND media group.
Berlin’s police chief, Barbara Slowik Meisel, said she would deploy an additional 1,500 officers in the capital, though she had little reason to fear that people or property would come under attack.
“We have no concrete evidence of any coordinated looting operations being planned,” she said.
About 10,000 protesters, mainly pupils, students and their parents, are expected at the Brandenburg Gate on Saturday afternoon, with another smaller gathering planned in the early evening in the Mitte district.
Large rallies have also been called in Cologne, Munich, Frankfurt and Hamburg.
The team behind Gen Z regelt has used social media and its website to call on participants to exercise restraint: “Our protest is peaceful, without exception. Violence goes against everything we stand for. Only through peaceful means can we achieve something together.”
By Friday, more than 160,000 people had registered on the website saying they planned to attend the protests.
The federal pupils’ conference, a youth political lobbying group, has distanced itself from Saturday’s demonstrations, saying the initiative’s “unclear” organisational structure made the events unpredictable.
It plans to hold a separate protest in Berlin on 20 November that will include teachers and other youth movements focused on the marked decline in German school performance.
In France, the interior minister, Laurent Nuñez, said Saturday looked like “a very high risk” day, adding that 70,000 police and gendarmes, including elite units, would be deployed in an effort to quell violence on the sidelines of the new wave of protests.
Nuñez said late on Thursday that radical groups had called on social media for violent Halloween gatherings and that the biggest threat to public order would probably come after mainstream cost-of-living demonstrations had officially ended.
“We are seeing many calls from the labour movement, the radicalised far left and certain radicalised gilets jaunes [yellow vests], urging people to attend rallies on public streets starting at 8pm in many cities across France,” he said.
The calls were “accompanied by various messages which are quite radical”, Nuñez added, including some demanding “revolution”. He said authorities would “tolerate zero excesses” and promised an “extremely firm” security response.
Measures introduced last weekend to protect shops would be reinforced, Nuñez said, and while peaceful demonstrations would be authorised, most would not be permitted “in city centres, where there is a risk of public disorder”.
It is unclear what will happen in Paris. Two separate marches planned by unions and gilets jaunes through the city centre have been banned. Instead, police have authorised a single march in the far south-east. Both sets of organisers are challenging the decision to exclude them from the centre.
The interior ministry has said 410,000 people marched last Saturday, when a strong police presence mostly prevented a repeat of the widespread violence and looting that swept French cities during a first wave of mass protest on 17 October.
Unions and the gilets jaunes movement protesting over low wages, the cost of living and deteriorating public services have joined school and university students calling for better learning conditions, with a nationwide strike called for 5 November.
Government measures to address the students’ demands – including replacing a creaking university admissions platform and providing loans to local authorities for school renovations – did not go far enough, student leaders said.
