LAST UPDATE | 22 mins ago

FRENCH POLICE HAVE arrested “nearly 1,000″ people today in nationwide protests in which officers were confronted with “an extremely elevated level of violence” from black-clad extremists, Interior Minister Laurent Nunez said.

Although marches over the cost of living “passed off well” in cities, “ultra-left” groups took to throwing projectiles and aiming fireworks at police to provoke clashes, he told journalists.

Two people were “seriously injured”, he said: one in the city of Toulouse, where a 20-year-old man reportedly had fingers blown off, and the other in Clermont-Ferrand. He did not give details of either case.

Nunez compared Saturday’s figures with those from a week ago, when a first round of national demonstrations over the cost of living degenerated into street violence, with hundreds of shops looted and 2,700 people ending up being arrested.

He said that the nearly 1,000 arrests recorded on Saturday compared with the same time a week ago, when authorities had recorded 385 arrests.

He also said that, while some shops and businesses had been vandalised and looted on Saturday, “the scale was far smaller” than a week earlier, and he stressed that shopping centres had been well protected this time.

In Paris, where the main demonstration passed off largely peacefully, but clashes broke out with police as the crowd dispersed, Nunez said “several thousand radical activists gathered at the rear of the march, including around 500 individuals identified as rioters”.

Ensuing clashes in the capital lasted for around two hours, he said.

The minister said that in the southern cities of Cannes and Montpellier, authorities “for the first time” saw far-right activists who sought confrontations with “ultra-left militants” or who claimed to be there to protect businesses.

Overall, Nunez said, Saturday’s outcome appeared more “positive” than a week ago, with more police on the streets acting more rapidly, conducting more pre-demonstration checks and better protecting businesses.

Near Paris’s Bastille neighbourhood, a clothing store had removed all its merchandise from shelves ahead of today’s demonstrations, while a nearby restaurant was boarded up with signs insisting it was “still open”. Many other retailers in the capital also had wooden boards covering their windows.

The Louvre and the Musée d’Orsay museums were closed.

A demonstrator holds a sign reading, “Marine, give back the money for education. Alamy Alamy

Protest against far-right party

Adding to tensions, far-right leader Marine Le Pen’s National Rally (RN) party was holding a weekend congress in the central city of Orleans to kick off her campaign for elections in six months to choose President Emmanuel Macron’s successor.

Thousands of people yelling anti-fascist slogans marched on Saturday against Le Pen, and also against Macron, a pro-business centrist leader. “Macron resign. Le Pen in prison,” the crowd yelled.

The violence last weekend and the heightened tensions over this weekend’s demonstrations highlighted the febrile atmosphere in France ahead of that vote, which Le Pen is best-placed, according to surveys, to win.

Inflation in France, as elsewhere, has been sent surging by the Middle East war, started in February by US President Donald Trump and Israel.

Protests have also been taking place in Italy, Belgium, Spain and Portugal over different issues, yet with some overlap on inflation and education problems. Italy has sent 500 troops to try to quell street violence in Milan.

Amnesty International denounced what it called “a slide toward authoritarian practice”, saying the police measures in France were “jeopardising the right to demonstrate peacefully”.

“Police have a responsibility both to ensure that protests can take place peacefully and safely and to protect the public from violent disorder,” said Eva Cosse, senior Europe researcher at Human Rights Watch University. “And it’s not possible anymore.”