Tens of thousands of people demonstrated in Austria on Saturday for the third weekend in a row against government measures to fight the coronavirus, including the vaccination which will be compulsory from February, police said.
Read alsoCovid-19: in difficulty, Austria confines the unvaccinated
Several arrests were made for disturbances of public order, according to the police who identified "
more than 40,000
" demonstrators in Vienna, after several rallies in the capital. According to the police, some demonstrators threw "
pyrotechnic devices
" at
the police
who responded with the use of pepper spray and a counter-demonstration brought together 1,500 people.
Austria has been experiencing a new partial confinement since November 22, in effect until December 11, and it is the first country in the European Union to have announced that vaccination would be compulsory, from February 1. Measures that the government has defended by citing a fourth wave of Covid-19 cases which puts pressure on hospital intensive care units as well as by the vaccination rate of 67%, among the lowest in Western Europe.
Since the re-containment, the number of contaminations in this country of 8.9 million inhabitants has stalled, dropping from 13,000 per day to below 10,000, without the measure reaching unanimity. According to media reports, entire families with children had made the trip and crossed all of Austria to demonstrate in Vienna on Saturday. Hostility to partial confinement and compulsory vaccination is encouraged by the far-right FPÖ party, which accuses the Conservative / Green coalition government of "
dictatorship
".
Far-right Identitarians were among the protesters on Saturday, according to media reports.
Earlier in the week, the new head of the Austrian domestic intelligence agency Omar Haijawi-Pirchner stressed that some opponents of the measures against the coronavirus posed "
at the moment the greatest threat for us
".