By Inti Landauro
PARIS, Oct 6 (Reuters) – 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.
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 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.
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.
THOUSANDS OF ARRESTS
France’s Justice Ministry said 5,060 people have been arrested since the protests began, with 87% of them minors. More than 1,800 people are being prosecuted, including 1,483 minors, the ministry said, without specifying the crimes. It said 790 cases had been dismissed.
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 the far-right National Rally, led by presidential frontrunner Marine Le Pen, 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.
(Reporting by Inti Landauro; writing by Richard Lough; Editing by Andrew Heavens)
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