Massive protest caps European anti-austerity strikes

Hundreds of thousands of protesters swamped Madrid in a massive rejection of austerity on Wednesday, capping Europe-wide strikes that boiled over into sporadic clashes.

Chanting, whistling and setting off firecrackers, people filled the centre of the Spanish capital after millions joined strikes in Spain and Portugal and work stoppages in Italy and Greece.

“They are taking away our future,” declared banners hanging in the main squares of Madrid where people massed, flanked by riot police and overseen by a helicopter.

“We have the solution, send the bankers to prison!,” protesters chanted amid a sea of union flags.

“A magnificent night in Madrid!” the secretary general of Spain’s biggest Comisiones Obreras union, Ignacio Fernandez Toxo, told the crowds, estimating their number at more than a million.

A smoke bomb sent red clouds over Madrid’s central Neptuno square, where hundreds of activists faced off against riot police blocking access to the nearby lower house of parliament.

General strikes in Spain, where unions claimed many millions abided by the action, and Portugal paralysed swathes of industries and hit road, rail and air transport.

It was the biggest coordinated day of European industrial action since the crisis broke out, European unions said.

The vast majority of the protests were peaceful despite a seething frustration among millions at the high unemployment, recession and a seemingly relentless austerity squeeze.

But some police and protesters clashed, sometimes brutally, in Spain, Portugal and Italy.

In Madrid, riot police earlier fired rubber bullets into the air and struck protesters with batons to disperse them from the central Plaza de Cibeles square, an AFP journalist at the scene said.

Spanish police arrested 118 people through the day and medical services treated 74 injured including 43 police, the government said, insisting however that these numbers and the strike in general were down from the last general strike in March.

Portuguese police charged protesters who had gathered in front of the parliament building in Lisbon, striking them with batons after demonstrators hurled stones and rubbish at them.

Five protesters were injured by objects hurled by other demonstrators and one had to be hospitalised, a police spokesman said.

In Italy, 17 police officers were wounded in clashes as tens of thousands of students and workers took to the streets of Rome, Milan, Turin and around 100 other towns and cities.

About 20 activists were seen beating an officer with sticks and baseball bats in Turin, while a dozen officers were hurt in running street battles in the centre of Milan, police said.

In Rome, dozens of young protesters hurled stones and bottles and smashed up cars as they tried to break through lines of police who responded with tear gas and used armoured cars to force them back.

Both Portugal and Spain have legislation guaranteeing minimum services in essential industries.

In Spain, Iberia, Iberia Express, Air Nostrum, Vueling, Air Europa and easyJet nevertheless cut more than 600 flights including some 250 international routes. Ryanair said no flights had been scrapped but warned of baggage check-in delays.

Portugal’s TAP said it was grounding more than 170 flights, most of them international.

Greece’s unions are focused on the national crisis and their protest was limited to a three-hour work stoppage and a rally in Athens estimated at 5,000 people by police.

Union-led rallies to support the day of action were being held in France, Belgium and in Poland, where workers decried “social and wage-dumping” in their country.

Thousands of people took to the streets in cities across France, protesting at salary cuts, tax hikes and spending cuts in the eurozone’s second biggest economy.

The strike coincides with a heated debate over the pursuit of austerity policies in the midst of recession around the eurozone.

The International Monetary Fund admitted last month that it had underestimated the extent to which such measures brake economic growth, opening the way to relaxed deficit-cutting targets in countries such as Portugal.