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Riot police fire teargas as 250,000 take part in schools protests across France

Police have fired teargas at ⁠protesters as more than 250,000 pupils, teachers and parents demonstrated across France on the biggest day yet of a campaign for better high school conditions that has been marred by often violent clashes with police. The French prime minister, Sébastien Lecornu, said at least 215 teenagers and 85 school staff had been injured since the protests began more than a fortnight ago, calling the figures “the heaviest ⁠toll in decades paid by the school system”. The country’s president, Emmanuel Macron, called key ministers to the Élysée palace for talks on Tuesday night, French media reported. The interior ministry said 200,000 people had taken part in mainly peaceful marches in cities including Marseille, Nantes ⁠and Lyon on Tuesday, with 56,000 more joining the biggest demonstration in Paris. Organisers put the total at 450,000. Most passed off without serious incident, but some – including in Paris – ended in sporadic vandalism and running skirmishes with riot police, with officers firing teargas and carrying out baton charges to disperse protesters. Trade unions and rights groups have accused the police of using unnecessary force against the young protesters in recent days, with Amnesty International saying French authorities should “put an end to the disproportionate police repression”. At Tuesday’s demonstration in Paris, students held aloft smoke flares and placards with slogans including “under our text books, anger” – a nod to a celebrated “under the paving stones, the beach” slogan from the May 1968 student riots. Other slogans included “schools with no money = country with no future”. One student, Anna, told reporters at the capital’s Place de la Nation: “Our demands are simple: better study conditions, enough teachers, decent school buildings. The authorities’ response has been catastrophic. There’s enough violence already.” Tuesday’s marches came after two weeks of protests that ⁠began in the northern suburbs of Paris and have snowballed nationwide. Besides the injuries to protesters and staff, 715 police officers have been wounded in the clashes, Lecornu’s office said. Demonstrators have set dustbins on fire outside their schools, destroyed bus shelters and hurled projectiles at riot police, who have responded with batons, teargas and riot-control rounds. Twenty-four schools have been burned or ransacked since mid-September, while more than 6,100 people have been arrested, almost all of them minors. More than 1,800 are being prosecuted, nearly 1,500 of them under 18, the justice ministry said. The education ministry said more than 900 of the country’s 3,700 high schools were blockaded or had been closed for the day on Tuesday, although student groups put the number at 1,800. Some local education authorities moved classes ‌online. Océanne, 18, was among the marchers in Marseille. “We just want to save our education and be educated,” she said, adding that she had suffered from absent teachers who were replaced either by “pointless substitutes” or not at all. Many teachers were also demonstrating. In the western city of Rennes, Romain Dubourg said he and “about 30 colleagues” had “talked about the police brutality that we’ve witnessed, and decided to be there for our students if they need us”. Trade unionists were also on the marches, with the head of the CGT union, Sophie Binet, urging members to “protect high school students”. The Green party leader, Marine Tondelier, urged local officials and parents to wear white and “go and protect our children during demonstrations”. Anne Savinel-Barras, the president of Amnesty France, said: “The images and testimonies widely circulated over the past week raise alarming concerns about the dangerous use of teargas, batons and policing techniques by the police.” The interior minister, Laurent Nuñez, said police had launched 10 internal investigations into allegations of brutality since the protests started. On Monday, a 15-year-old’s hand was blown off as protesters battled riot police in northern France. A 16-year-old lost the use of his right eye after he was seriously injured in the head on Wednesday during the blockade of a high school in Tours. The local prosecutor, Catherine Sorita-Minard, said the wounds were “compatible with the impact of a defensive bullet of the blast ball type”. In another incident, a 14-year-old lost most of his teeth on Monday when a police officer appeared to fire a grenade at him at close range during a protest north-west of Paris. “His jaw is sealed shut, he can no longer speak and he eats through a straw,” his mother told reporters. Lecornu has ordered his ministers to tackle the students’ core demands, which include ensuring absent teachers are replaced, reviewing the length of the 8am to 6pm school day and repairing ‌ageing buildings. He denied accusations of routine excess force by police, saying officers had mostly acted proportionately. He told MPs on Tuesday that “extreme violence” had come “knocking on high-school doors, and must be condemned”. “Setting fire to a school will not help repair it. Attacking a teacher will not help replace missing staff,” he said. The protests, seven months before crucial presidential elections to choose a successor to Macron, have piled pressure on a government trying to reduce a ballooning budget deficit amid mounting investor concern over France’s mountainous debt and weak economic growth. The government has accused the radical-left La France Insoumise party of encouraging and even orchestrating the movement after numerous LFI MPs attended school blockades. The party’s veteran leader and presidential candidate, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, has strongly supported the protests, while urging non-violence.

Unemployment and the rise of the Nazis | Letter

Philipp Ruch believes that the impact of the 1929 Wall Street crash cannot explain the Nazi breakthrough at the 1930 Reichstag election, as the full effects of Black Thursday “didn’t fully arrive in Germany until July 1931” (‘Hitler was a lazy criminal who slept in until noon’: why most of what we think we know about the rise of the Nazis is wrong, 1 October). But unemployment more than doubled between 1928 and the 1930 election, and that fact alone might be thought sufficient to explain the change in Nazi fortunes. Not so, says Ruch, for “in regions where unemployment was high, the Nazi party performed relatively poorly. If anything, unemployment was a factor contributing to anti-fascist resilience.” This, however, marks a failure to appreciate how rising unemployment was seen by most Germans at the time. Not only did they see it as signifying one aspect of the failure of the coalition parties in government to manage the economy competently, but they also rightly regarded it as fuelling the rise of the Communist party of Germany (KPD) – with it being the other great political beneficiary of the Wall Street crash along with the National Socialist German Workers’ party. As the KPD grew, so the Nazi party grew – as it was perceived as the only party with the resolve and the numbers (thanks to the brownshirts) to stop the communists seizing power on the streets. The fact that the KPD proved a damp squib should not blind us to the fact that the party once inspired genuine, strong and very widespread fear. John Plowright Repton, Derbyshire • Have an opinion on anything you’ve read in the Guardian today? Please email us your letter and it will be considered for publication in our letters section.

Outcry in Trinidad and Tobago after passing of police bill that could threaten press freedom

Journalists in Trinidad and Tobago have called for an urgent amendment to a sweeping new bill that increases police powers of search and seizure, which they argue threatens the country’s much-vaunted freedom of the press. The government says the special operations bill 2026, passed on 24 September, is designed to tackle alarmingly high crime and murder rates in the Caribbean nation. The country has spent more than a year in an almost perpetual state of emergency, with police empowered to bypass normal constitutional rights around arrest, detention, and search and seizure. But journalists in Trinidad and Tobago have called for explicit exemptions in the new legislation to prevent police from searching and seizing their notebooks, phones and laptops. In the past, journalists have been forced to challenge warrants empowering police to raid their homes and offices. Although the country prides itself in honouring freedom of speech, ranking 19 out of 180 countries in the 2025 Reporters Without Borders press freedom index, this year it fell 13 places to 32, and journalists say they are deeply concerned about whether they can protect whistleblowers and vulnerable sources who share information on the understanding that they will be protected. The president of the Media Association of Trinidad and Tobago (MATT), Prior Beharry, said the organisation had called for clause 15 of the bill to be urgently amended “to explicitly shield our devices and materials … and confidential source information from standard police seizure”. Clause 15 prevents police from seizing “a tool of a lawful trade or business” or material protected by legal professional privilege. But MATT says journalism is not explicitly recognised as a protected trade, nor does the bill establish a procedure for handling confidential journalistic material discovered during searches. It wants the clause changed to “expressly name journalism as a protected lawful trade and safeguard journalists’ devices, materials and confidential sources”. Beharry said the bill’s search‑and‑seizure powers were particularly worrying in a digital era where “the tools of a journalist is … usually [a] cell phone”. Though he said journalists had not been directly threatened under recent states of emergency, he warned that other restrictions were worsening. “One of the issues we are having is the access to the government, the executive, including the prime minister, who has not had an official press conference for more than a year,” he said. “Ministries use state resources and we are not invited, but state media is invited.” The independent journalist Pearce Robinson said the combination of surveillance capability, expanded search powers – without explicit protection for journalistic practice – and declining access to government ministers created a “concrete” threat to press freedom, with a particularly significant impact on investigative reporting. “If your phone, your laptop and your notes can be searched or seized without explicit protection for journalistic material, that raises serious constitutional concerns,” he said. “Investigative journalism depends on people being able to speak confidentially.” He also raised concerns about phone tapping and surveillance, pointing to an investigation by the Trinidad and Tobago Guardian which said that “judges approved 314 warrants to intercept communications in Trinidad and Tobago between 2020 and May 2026”. “My concern is not that press freedom has disappeared,” he said. “It is that several of these pressures … are accumulating at the same time.” Pedro Cárdenas, of the press freedom and human rights organisation Article 19, expressed concern about the clause in the new bill. “It empowers law enforcement officers to seize any vehicle, article or document deemed likely to be of substantial value. We find this clause particularly problematic because it is vague and opens up to discussion what is substantial value or not,” he said. He added that it “might directly counter” existing international human rights laws. The office of the prime minister did not respond to a request for comment. Stuart Young, Trinidad and Tobago’s former prime minister, labelled the bill “unconstitutional and very dangerous”, adding that it “breaches fundamental and entrenched constitutional rights” and was passed “without a required constitutional majority in highly questionable circumstances”. He said the government’s past use of emergency powers – including detaining citizens without charge – showed “the real likelihood of abuse” under the new legislation.

‘This is state violence’: Paris students rage at politicians and heavy-handed policing

Before dawn on Tuesday outside the Lycée Sophie-Germain in central Paris, hundreds of teenagers dragged wheelie bins, metal barriers and shopping trolleys to build a barricade outside the front door of their secondary school. Climbing to the top of the piles of bins, pupils held banners calling for more funding and greater equality in French schools. But they were also protesting against French riot police, who have been accused by human rights groups of using disproportionate force against children in what is fast becoming the biggest youth protest movement in decades. “Everyone hates the police,” chanted a group of 15- and 16-year-olds. At least 215 teenagers, 715 police officers and 85 teaching staff have been injured in clashes in recent days, according to the government. “We’re teenagers with wheelie bins, and the police have heavy weapons, it’s totally mismatched,” said Livia, 17, who was studying theatre at a lycée in northern Paris and did not want her real name published. “The police are extremely violent in France. This is state violence and it’s horrible seeing police allowed to target children. It’s important to remember this is institutionalised violence, it’s planned and deliberate.” Ten investigations into possible police brutality are under way after injuries allegedly involving the use of police weapons, including one 15-year-old who lost his hand, another who lost his eye and a boy whose jaw and teeth were shattered, leaving him, as his mother said, barely able to eat with a straw in hospital. “The policing is catastrophic, people have been mutilated by weapons – one boy has lost an eye – it’s horrible,” said Lily, 17 (not her real name), who was studying social sciences in her final year of school and demonstrating for more funding in what she called a discriminatory education system that left poorer children behind. “My parents support me being on the barricades and at the protests. They’re worried about the policing, but they said they’d come and get me from the police station if I was arrested.” Teenagers nearby held up cardboard signs protesting against the use of teargas and the deployment of riot police. “A state that gasses high school students is a weak state,” read one banner. “Gas rapists, not children,” said another sign in reference to calls for tougher laws against sexual violence. Another banner read: “Not here to riot.” The unprecedented protest movement that began outside one school in a low-income Paris suburb has spread across the country, taking the government by surprise. Hundreds of high schools have been barricaded and forced to close as pupils protest against teacher shortages, crumbling buildings and overcrowded classes. The justice ministry said 5,060 people had been arrested ⁠since the protests began, 87% of them minors. More than 1,800 people had been prosecuted, including 1,483 minors, the ministry said, without specifying the crimes. It said 790 cases had been dismissed. The government said 24 schools had been burned or ransacked. “In more than 20 years of teaching, I’ve never seen protests this big,” said one teacher at Sophie-Germain high school who planned to join the Paris demonstration on Tuesday afternoon. “The students in central Paris have shown a great sense of solidarity with those in the Paris suburbs who face much worse conditions in their schools. There’s a feeling of solidarity and generosity between teenagers that flies in the face of the notion that we live in an era of selfishness. No one knows how long this will go on for.” Tens of thousands of students, trade unionists and parents were expected to march in support of the protests across France on Tuesday afternoon, including in Paris, Toulouse, Nice and Bordeaux, with riot police on alert. Isabella, 16, said she had the backing of her parents, who work in film and music. “Young people have been teargassed for doing nothing but trying to express their opinion,” she said. “Everybody told us that school was the great leveller, but today that is not the case at all. A teenager in the banlieue [suburbs] of Paris is never going to have the same opportunities as a student from the city centre. That’s why we’re here today.” Lionel, 17, who was in his final year at school and hoped to study English at university, said: “The aim isn’t to riot or smash things up, we just want to protest peacefully.” Teenagers also chanted songs against Marine Le Pen, the far-right, anti-immigration candidate in the 2027 presidential election, who is high in the polls as Emmanuel Macron steps down after a decade in office. Many teenagers were worried about the election. “We’re also protesting against the growth of the far right,” said Aislinn. Justine, 17, who had been at the barricade since before dawn, said she hoped the protest would continue and grow into a “massive” movement. “For years, there has been a mental health crisis among young people in France and anger at rundown schools and the stresses of the education system. We need the government to listen to us and make radical change.” Maya, an 18-year-old sports science student, had spent two days on a barricade at her university building in Bobigny in solidarity with school students, and joined the Paris protest march on Tuesday. She had attended high school in Drancy in Seine-Saint-Denis outside Paris, in a school she said had mould on the walls, not enough chairs for class and absent teachers who often were not replaced. “It’s only when we spoke to other students at university who came from different types of schools in the countryside or city centres that we realised our experience was so different and that there was a real injustice to the conditions we had to learn in,” she said. Julie, 46, a self-employed parent of two high schoolchildren from Levallois, in the west of Paris, had joined her husband to accompany her sons to the Paris march. She said: “We’re here to support our children but also to protect them from what is going on with the police and the violence we’ve seen with the police these last few days. We’ve seen our own child teargassed many times in front of his school … it’s unbelievable.” Students’ names have been changed.

State parliament elects Germany’s first far-right speaker since second world war

Alternative für Deutschland has become Germany’s first far-right party to secure the position of speaker of a regional parliament since the second world war. Tobias Rausch, a former estate agent, was elected in the first round of voting on Tuesday in Saxony-Anhalt. He won 48 out of the 82 votes cast. Later in the day, Hans-Thomas Tillschneider, part of the AfD’s more extreme wing, was elected as Rausch’s deputy. The AfD, which is classed as “rightwing extremist” by the eastern state’s intelligence agency, won nearly 44% of votes in elections last month, dealing a hammer blow to Germany’s chancellor, Friedrich Merz, and his centre-right Christian Democrats (CDU). Rausch’s election to the role of president of the parliament – and its speaker – took place at the inaugural gathering of members in the state capital, Magdeburg. Twenty-nine voted against Rausch and five abstained. The AfD parliamentary group holds 39 seats, narrowly short of an absolute majority. Five politicians from the BSW, a small leftwing party that echoes the AfD’s stances on Russia and immigration, had already said they would vote for Rausch. Tuesday’s result means that four other MPs voted for the 35-year-old in the secret ballot. The willingness of politicians to break the “firewall” – a moral agreement among other parties to shun the AfD – gives the party a chance of being able to form a government in the state – a feat it had looked unlikely to pull off. This would be even more of a historical watershed in postwar Germany. The BSW’s support for Rausch came after the party’s founder, Sahra Wagenknecht, declared it was time to do away with “firewall idiocy”. The party’s deputy leader, Christian Leye, said the “firewall is not working” and the votes of nearly 44% of electors could not be ignored. “We need an intelligent way of dealing with the AfD and that means dealing with the content of their programme instead of a firewall,” Leye told German media. It was not immediately clear who was behind Tillschneider’s election because the BSW had said it would refuse to vote for him. He received 44 votes. As the architect of the AfD’s “radical” manifesto, he is lined up to become culture and science minister in the state. He has referred to the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, as “a real man with a sound set of values” and accused immigrants of “streaming in here in masses … wanting to squander our money”. Tillschneider is a scholar of Islamic studies who has described Islam as a “fungus” growing on the “German oak”. His family emigrated from Romania to Germany in the 1980s. In his acceptance speech, Rausch promised to represent all voices and “take different opinions seriously and to try to take decisions in a transparent way”. He was applauded by his own parliamentary group and the ranks of the BSW. The other MPs did not respond. Rausch was one of the key figures in a nepotism scandal over AfD MPs employing family members in parliament. He denied claims that several of his siblings and a brother-in-law were working in the state parliament but confirmed he was employing several players from the football club where he is a member. He is a close ally and confidant of Ulrich Siegmund, the AfD’s lead candidate, who is positioning himself to take over as leader of Saxony-Anhalt. He has yet to say which parties or politicians have agreed to cooperate with the AfD, only that “negotiations are going well”. The AfD claims to be courting members of the CDU to break the firewall, a claim CDU leaders deny. The BSW says it will support an AfD-led parliament only if a nonpartisan figure is appointed to lead it, a position the AfD rejects. Siegmund has until December to form a government. Opposition MPs raised alarm over the breaching of the firewall. “Whoever has invested a representative of extremist and anti-constitutional party with this office will bear responsibility for the consequences,” said Green MP Susan Sziborra-Seidlitz, to loud applause. The result of the Saxony-Anhalt poll, along with two other regional elections in September, has piled huge pressure on Merz, who pledged on taking office in 2025 that he would halve the AfD’s support by boosting the economy and reducing immigration. Instead, the CDU’s support has more or less halved and that of the AfD has surged to 30% in national polls. Before the vote, Eva von Angern of the leftwing Die Linke party and the longest-serving member of the Saxony-Anhalt parliament, drew parallels between Rausch’s election to the post of speaker, and Hermann Göring’s use of that role in the Reichstag in the 1930s to facilitate Adolf Hitler’s rise to power. She claimed that the negative consequences of the AfD’s win in the state were already being felt in lower tourist numbers and teachers withdrawing job applications.

‘No more Viktor Orbán’: EU plans 15-year probation period for new member states

The European Commission wants to ensure there is no repeat Viktor Orbán among the next generation of EU member states, as it set out plans to prepare for the bloc’s enlargement into eastern Europe in the next few years. In an interview with the Guardian and other European newspapers, the EU commissioner for enlargement, Marta Kos, outlined proposals for special safeguards to protect the bloc from leaders who could flout democratic values and hold hostage decision making, a pattern of behaviour exemplified for many by the former Hungarian prime minister. “No more Viktor Orbán,” said Kos. “We have to have quicker mechanisms than only article 7 [a sanction that allows a member state’s voting rights to be suspended] if the newcomers would go against the rule of law, democracy or our values.” Under the plans Kos published on Tuesday, any new EU member state would face a 15-year probation period, during which they could be stripped of voting rights or EU funds for breaching basic democratic values or loyalty to the EU, the principle of sincere cooperation. The plans would have to be agreed by EU member states. The EU treaty’s article 7 permits member states to remove voting rights from a rogue member state for a “serious and persistent breach” of democratic values. But this so-called nuclear option has never been triggered, despite lengthy discussions about democratic backsliding in Poland and Hungary, under previous governments. The ultimate sanction was never taken, largely because the two central European allies used their veto power to protect each other. Under the new proposals, the threshold for suspending voting rights – or another punishment – for breach of democratic standards, would be lower. An EU official said: “This is a big innovation and an important message to citizens in more enlargement-sceptical countries that we have a very strong framework even if something went wrong after enlargement.” But officials acknowledged the time-limited safeguard would eventually expire. “If this [safeguard] would be unlimited, we would … have the situation where we have first and second-class members,” Kos said. The call for stricter safeguards comes amid new momentum in EU enlargement, with Montenegro, Albania, Moldova and Ukraine all identified as frontrunners. The full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 injected new life into EU expansion, an issue which had long been moribund. Ukraine and Moldova filed applications to join the EU days after the Russian attack, a step that jolted life into EU accession efforts in the western Balkans, a region of 17.4 million people, where Russia and China are vying to gain influence. The EU’s existing 27 member states must agree unanimously to admit new member states, with scepticism notably high among French and Czech voters. Nevertheless, Kos said she believed enlargement was politically possible. “Member states also understand what is at stake,” she said, pointing to the contest for influence in eastern Europe and the Balkans. She named Russia and China as “external disruptive forces, who are after our candidates”. Describing enlargement as “our strategic interest”, she said: “If we are not able to integrate our neighbourhood, somebody else is coming [and] weaponising them against us.” As an example, she said Russia had “invested millions” trying to deter countries from a European path, citing elections in Moldova, an EU candidate country, and Armenia, which is seeking closer EU ties. China, on the other hand, she suggested, uses its economic clout as an investor to influence countries. EU officials hope to open negotiations with Ukraine and Moldova on two negotiating areas of EU law next week. Specifically, these are the “clusters” – thematic groups of negotiating files – for internal market and competitiveness, a vast swathe of the EU rulebook covering economic and monetary policy, tax policy, research and media. Kos said it was “much too early to speculate” on whether a country at war or with a frozen conflict on its territory could become an EU member. She confirmed that Ukrainian grain farmers would not get EU subsidies while facing restrictions on the EU market. Officials said Ukraine, known as the breadbasket of Europe and a vital supplier to Africa and the Middle East in prewar times, had a different scale of production to EU member states. EU leaders will discuss the ideas next week, when they will confront difficult choices. In order to avoid gridlock in a potential EU of 35 members, governments will be invited to waive veto rights on issues such as taxation and sanctions policy – and accept they may not always have a European commissioner in Brussels. Attempts to shrink the size of the European Commission in the past have run into opposition, notably from Irish voters who rejected the Lisbon treaty in 2008, in part because they objected to the loss of a permanent Irish top official. Ireland voted in favour of the treaty the following year, after EU leaders pledged the EU executive would continue to have one commissioner for each member state.

Norwegian princess Märtha Louise and husband sue ex-friends for ‘betrayal of trust’

The Norwegian princess Märtha Louise and her husband, the American businessman Durek Verrett, are suing several former members of their inner circle for defamation over what they described as a “calculated betrayal of trust”. Court documents filed in Los Angeles on 14 September claim the former friends and colleagues took “private access once afforded to them and weaponised it”. The accused include “former intimate partners, trusted business associates, a family member”. The documents allege that information including “confidential communications, disputed accusations and claimed insider knowledge” was used against Märtha Louise, Verrett and his company, Ohana, in what the couple describe as a “coordinated series of devastating public attacks”. The compensation claims total in excess of $80m, the newspaper VG reported. The legal action comes during a particularly challenging period for the Norwegian royal family. King Harald died in August aged 89, to be succeeded by his son, Haakon, who is Märtha Louise’s brother. Harald’s sister, Princess Astrid, died aged 94, two days after attending his funeral in September. At the same time, the royal family has been embroiled in several scandals including revelations about Queen Mette-Marit’s friendship with Jeffrey Epstein. Her son Marius Borg Høiby was found guilty of two counts of rape in June. The queen, who has pulmonary fibrosis, underwent a lung transplant in the same month. Märtha Louise and Verrett have been the subject of multiple headlines in recent years. In 2023, before marrying Verrett, who describes himself as a sixth-generation shaman, the princess renounced her royal duties to focus on the couple’s alternative medicine business. Last year they starred in a Netflix documentary about their lives, Rebel Royals: An Unlikely Love Story. The papers, filed to Los Angeles county superior court, state that the case was prompted by a “calculated betrayal of trust” and mention the “recent loss” of the late king. The alleged “incessant misconduct” was said to have started years ago, but “continued and escalated” in 2025 and 2026. “During that period, plaintiffs experienced significant medical and personal circumstances, including Verrett’s serious kidney failure, dialysis treatment, health deterioration and recent kidney transplant, as well as Princess Märtha Louise’s recent loss of her father,” the papers state. “Although plaintiffs would ordinarily have preferred to devote this period to their health, family, grief, and recovery, the timing of this filing is governed by applicable legal deadlines. Plaintiffs must proceed at this unfortunate time to preserve their claims and protect their rights arising from defendants’ publications and conduct in 2025 and 2026.” The lawsuit says the accused people, “far from being distant critics reporting from the outside”, were “at one time in the inner circle of Verrett and Princess Märtha Louise”. It adds: “They had been welcomed into Verrett’s private life, family relationships, communications, client-related affairs and business operations through relationships of intimacy, trust, confidence, and professional responsibility.” The couple’s US lawyer Richard Roth told VG: “Our clients’ reputations have been judged by the public for years. Now the facts will be tested in a court of law.” Court documents list two future hearings for the case in December. The palace and representatives of the couple have been contacted by the Guardian for comment.