Cost-of-living protests spread across Europe: riots in Milan, a tent camp in Lisbon
After weeks of unrest in Spain and France, anger over rents and living costs has reached Italy and Portugal. A Milan march ended with masked rioters fighting police and around 50 people detained, while hundreds camped overnight in Lisbon's Rossio Square. Meloni blamed 'hooligans'; Portugal's prime minister warned against importing instability.
The wave of protests over housing and the cost of living that has shaken Spain and France in recent weeks has now reached Italy and Portugal, with violent clashes in Milan and a protest camp set up in the heart of Lisbon over the weekend.
In Milan, a march against rising living costs on Saturday started peacefully but ended in confrontation. Masked rioters threw stones, paving blocks and other objects at riot police and set fire to barricades built from bar tables. Police responded with water cannon and teargas, and pictures from the aftermath showed a badly damaged carabinieri car. According to the Italian agency LaPresse, at least two officers were injured and about 50 protesters, many of them minors, were detained.
Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni said protesting was a right but setting cities on fire was not, accusing hooligans of hijacking the demonstration to spread chaos and attack the police. Milan's centre-left mayor, Giuseppe Sala, said the reasons behind the protest were understandable but the violence and the damage to the city could not be justified.
In Lisbon, protesters pitched dozens of tents in Rossio Square, the busy tourist centre of the capital, after a day of marches that drew thousands of people across Portugal. Hundreds, most of them young, vowed to stay the night, singing around the statue of King Pedro IV. One protester, a 46-year-old social worker, told AFP that the tax-paying class that keeps the country going was losing its right to housing and that people were suffocating. Official figures show Portuguese house prices rose by 124% between 2015 and 2024, about twice the EU average, with young people and Lisbon residents hit hardest. The Lisbon camp follows a similar one in Porto and echoes the encampment that appeared in Madrid three weeks ago.
Portugal's prime minister, Luís Montenegro, said his government understood people's anger over what they saw as gaps in public policy, but warned rivals against importing climates of instability and protest that, in his words, have no backing in Portuguese society, an apparent reference to the riots in France.
The unrest has different triggers in each country. In Spain, anger boiled over after an 87-year-old woman was evicted when she could not pay a steep rent rise, and Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez has called a snap election for the end of November after his emergency housing measures were voted down. In France, a protest over conditions in schools in the poorer suburbs of Paris has grown into a national movement, and more than 1,200 people were arrested there on Saturday alone.