Part of the French anti-health passport convoys left the Paris region on Sunday to reach Brussels and demonstrate there on Monday, despite the ban on the Belgian authorities, while Paris remained under close police surveillance.
Thousands of opponents of the health pass or President Emmanuel Macron had converged on Paris to demonstrate there on Saturday, baptizing their movement “freedom convoys”, like the convoys in Canada which are paralyzing Ottawa today and which have made emulators in several other countries. The Parisian demonstration had been banned by the police headquarters.
The authorities had counted 3,000 vehicles for 5,000 demonstrators around Paris on Friday evening, but in the end they did not all reach the capital.
Some could join Lille, in the north of France, then Brussels on Monday, according to a police source.
Nearly 650 vehicles spent the night from Saturday to Sunday in three of the departments of the Paris region as well as in the Bois de Boulogne, in the west of Paris. Two hundred of these vehicles, parked in the northern suburbs, left in the middle of the morning, with a clearly stated desire to go to Brussels, in a calm and friendly atmosphere, a police source also indicated.
The Belgian authorities for their part banned any demonstration in the capital “with motorized vehicles” and announced last Thursday that they had taken measures “to prevent the blocking of the Brussels-Capital region”.
In Paris, some 7,500 members of the order have been mobilized since Friday to avoid any blockage.
In tweets, the Paris police headquarters said “maintain its device this Sunday” and remain vigilant “to prevent blockages at the gates of Paris with reinforced checks throughout the day”.
On Saturday the police arrested 97 people, 81 of whom remained in police custody on Sunday morning, and fined 513, according to an official report. They notably intervened at night in the Champs-Elysées district and in the Bois de Boulogne to disperse the last participants, said the police headquarters.
At the beginning of the afternoon on Saturday, more than a hundred vehicles had managed to reach the very touristy Champs-Élysées, before being gradually evacuated with tear gas.
The French movement brings together opponents of the vaccine pass which reserves access to people immunized against Covid-19 to a good number of places welcoming the public but also demonstrators with social demands. The latter relating to purchasing power and the cost of energy are similar to those of the great popular protest movement of the “yellow vests” which had shaken France for several months from the fall of 2018.