The day following a wild demonstration following the use of 49.3 to have the pension reform adopted, the Lyon opponents of the project put it back on Friday evening.
Several hundred people gathered following 7:30 p.m. Place des Jacobins then went up the Presqu’île to reach the Hôtel de Ville, which had been the victim of damage Thursday evening with tags and broken windows.
But the police had no intention this time of letting the groups of thugs reach the central town hall. Tear gas shots dispersed the demonstrators with their faces hidden before they moved to the Place de la Comédie.
The latter, however, set fire to trash cans and tagged shop windows on their route, but in lesser proportions than the day before. Anti-Macron and anti-police slogans were chanted by the demonstrators.
The facades of the town hall of the 1st arrondissement on Place Sathonay have also been tagged.
It was finally by heading towards Croix-Rousse that the most violent demonstrators committed their worst misdeed: they managed to infiltrate the town hall of the 4th arrondissement where offices were ransacked and a fire lit in garbage cans the entrance.
The prefect of the Rhône Fabienne Buccio declared “strongly condemn the intrusion and the ransacking of the town hall of the 4th arrondissement of Lyon. It also welcomes the rapid intervention of the police to put an end to it and extinguish the beginning of a fire started at the entrance to the building”.
A record of 36 arrests was announced in Lyon.
Mayor Grégory Doucet also condemned “with the greatest firmness” this attack on the town hall which was “the theater of intolerable degradation”.
This evening, the town hall of the 4th was the scene of intolerable damage.
I strongly condemn this attack on a public building. #Lyon
— Gregory Doucet (@Gregorydoucet) March 17, 2023
In April 2022, on the evening of the first round of the presidential election, the town hall of the 4th arrondissement had already been attacked by demonstrators unhappy with the qualifications of Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen. Firework mortars were fired on the facade of the public building.
A new event might be held this Saturday in Lyon. But the State services anticipated and prohibited any gathering in the Presqu’île between Bellecour and Hôtel de Ville, as well as in the sector of the Rhône prefecture.
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