Tear Gas Over the Duomo as Cost of Living Protests Hit Milan and Bologna

Police fired tear gas across the Piazza del Duomo in Milan on October 17 as cost of living protests that began peacefully turned into clashes, with demonstrators throwing stones and officers responding with crowd control measures more associated with riots than economic marches. Milan and Bologna both saw looting and fires break out alongside the unrest, and police detained roughly 50 people, many of them minors, with at least two officers reported injured.

Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni responded by drawing a sharp line between the demonstrations themselves and the violence that accompanied them, saying the right to protest was not in question but blaming what she called hooligans who exploit demonstrations to sow chaos for the looting and clashes. The distinction let her government avoid condemning the underlying cost of living grievance while still rejecting the specific scenes playing out in two of Italy's largest cities.

Italy's unrest was one piece of a far larger pattern across Europe that same day. France saw the biggest numbers by far, more than 550,000 demonstrators across cities including Paris, Marseille, Nice, Nantes, Bordeaux, Limoges, Lille, Toulouse and Strasbourg, where tear gas and water cannon met protesters, roughly 1,200 people were arrested and around 150 police officers were injured. Rioters set fires in public buildings and vandalized city halls in Marseille and Lille, and in Limoges a town hall standing for 140 years was destroyed. French Prime Minister Sebastien Lecornu said afterward that it was a miracle the toll was not higher.

Belgium and Portugal saw their own versions of the same day. In Brussels and Liege, protests that followed weeks of student demonstrations over university registration fees turned into clashes where police used tear gas and water cannon against crowds accused of throwing projectiles and setting fires. In Lisbon, tens of thousands marched over a housing crisis that has seen prices roughly double since 2017 alongside stagnant wages, a protest that stayed largely peaceful even as Portugal's parliamentary affairs minister Carlos Abreu Amorim said the government would not yield to shouts from the street.

Alberto Alemanno, an expert who has tracked the unrest, described the common thread running through all four countries as a set of shared grievances, underfunded education, a rising cost of living, and uncertain prospects for young graduates entering a difficult job market, and warned the same pressures could soon produce similar scenes in Greece, Germany and Austria. For Italy, the timing adds a domestic edge to that warning, a government already managing a contested electoral law reform and an approaching election now also has to decide how much of this unrest it can describe as hooliganism before the economic grievance underneath it demands an answer of its own.