France’s Interior Ministry said turnout stood at 320,000 on Saturday.
In Italy, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s far-right government also said it would deploy 500 army troops alongside the 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 demonstrations were largely peaceful, but an NBC News crew saw police use a water cannon on protesters and groups of police charging to disperse protesters.
In Serbia, student-led activism also helped unseat the country’s long-time leader at the ballot box.
Meanwhile, police in Portugal early Sunday forcibly cleared a tent camp set up in Lisbon by activists protesting against high housing costs.
Hundreds of protesters shielding the tent camp were dispersed by police using shields and some baton charges, the Reuters news agency reported.
While the protests across the continent have drawn comparisons for their timing, Andrew Barclay, a politics lecturer at the University of Sheffield, said it was important to focus on their differences.
The French protests have involved “hundreds of thousands taking to the streets over many weeks, and at least initially centered on specific grievances about education funding,” he told NBC News.
While protests elsewhere may have taken inspiration form the French, he said, “their scale so far hasn’t been as large, and whilst the state of education continues to be a common theme, the issues being protested has ballooned to include a much larger number of complaints.”
Similarly, Barclay said the protests in Germany and France were unlikely to lead to a direct change in governance as they did in Serbia.
“Often protests, even quite large ones, don’t capture that level of support elsewhere in the country,” he said. “I would be very cautious about comparing what we have seen in Serbia, where students and others have organized to oppose state corruption, to the sorts of protests that we are seeing elsewhere.”
