The French Interior Ministry announced that the turnout stood at 320,000 people on Saturday.
In Italy, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s far-right government also announced it would deploy 500 troops alongside police in Milan until the end of the year after groups of masked protesters looted stores in the fashion capital and elsewhere and threw projectiles at police earlier this month.
Tens of thousands of people again took to the streets of Rome on Friday and other cities and towns across the country.
The protests were largely peaceful, but an NBC News crew saw police using a water cannon on demonstrators and groups of police charging to disperse demonstrators.
In Serbia, student activism also helped unseat the country’s longtime leader at the polls.
Separately, Portuguese police emptied a tent camp set up in Lisbon on Sunday morning by activists protesting against the high cost of housing.
Hundreds of protesters protecting the tent camp were dispersed by police using shields and baton blows, the Reuters news agency reported.
While the protests across the continent have led to comparisons over their timing, Andrew Barclay, professor of politics at the University of Sheffield, said it was important to focus on their differences.
The French protests involved “hundreds of thousands of people taking to the streets over several weeks and, at least initially, they were focused on specific grievances over education funding,” he told NBC News.
Although protests elsewhere may have taken inspiration from the French, he said, “their scale so far has not been as great, and while the state of education continues to be a common theme, the issues being protested have grown to include a much larger number of complaints.” »
Similarly, Barclay said protests in Germany and France were unlikely to lead to a direct change in governance as was the case in Serbia.
“Oftentimes protests, even large ones, do not generate this level of support elsewhere in the country,” he said. “I would be very careful about comparing what we saw in Serbia, where students and others organized to oppose state corruption, to the type of protests we are seeing elsewhere. »
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