France’s Interior Ministry said turnout was 320,000 on Saturday. In Italy, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s far-right government also said it would deploy 500 army troops along with 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 took to the streets again on Friday in Rome and other cities and towns across the country. peaceful, but an NBC News crew saw police using a water cannon on protesters and groups of police charging to disperse protesters. In Serbia, student-led activism also helped topple the country’s leader at the polls. Meanwhile, police in Portugal forcibly cleared a tent camp set up in Lisbon by activists protesting against high housing costs. Hundreds of protesters protecting the tent camp were dispersed by police using shields and some baton charges, Reuters reported. the news agency reported. While protests across the continent have drawn 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 have involved “hundreds of thousands of people taking to the streets over many weeks, and at least initially focused on specific grievances about education funding,” he told NBC News. While protests elsewhere may have been inspired by the French, he said, “their scale so far hasn’t been as often protests, even the largest ones, don’t capture that level of support in other parts of the country,” he said. “I would be very cautious comparing what we’ve seen in Serbia, where students and others have organized to oppose state corruption, with the kind of protests we’re seeing elsewhere.”
