About 5,000 people - including neo-Nazis - braved Sunday, January 31 in Vienna, in violation of health measures, a ban on demonstrating against the curfew and confinement decided by the government to try to contain the coronavirus.
Read also: Covid-19: for fear of the variant, Austria extends its confinement
The police banned the demonstration on Saturday, following a previous parade that gathered 10,000 people in mid-January, during which many participants did not wear masks and did not respect sanitary distances.
But according to the police, several thousand people still responded on Sunday afternoon to the call of the far-right party FPÖ, which organized the demonstration and deemed
its ban
"
scandalous
".
Among them are neo-Nazi activists and hooligans.
The police proceeded to arrests, while the crowd refused to disperse and wanted to march towards the parliament, blocking traffic.
Earlier in the week, former Interior Minister Herbert Kickl, a member of the FPÖ party, called for taking to the streets this Sunday against the curfew and the third lockdown in force.
It was the first time that this party officially organized a rally contesting the measures decided by the eco-conservative government to try to limit contamination with Covid-19.
This demonstration had been banned because of the “
disturbances to public order
” that it was likely to cause.
The FPÖ then filed a second request for authorization to “
defend democracy, freedom and fundamental rights
”, but the police also rejected it.
She had put forward the risk of cluster, "
because of the increased transmissibility of the new variants
" and "
the lack of traceability of contacts
" in the ranks of the demonstrators.
Despite a new containment and an extension of the curfew decreed after Christmas, Austria, which has 8.9 million inhabitants, recorded 1190 new infections on Sunday.
Schools, sports halls, hotels, restaurants, non-essential stores and cultural venues are closed.
The Social Democratic opposition voted on Saturday in favor of reopening schools on February 8.