Covid-19: Austria is confined, anger is roaring in Europe – South West

Vienna, another dead city. Shops, restaurants, Christmas markets, concerts or hairdressers lower the curtain: with the exception of schools, the capital and the rest of the territory wake up in silence on Monday.

Since vaccines were made available to as many people as possible, no country in the European Union had dared to take the plunge.

Containment for all in Austria

As in previous confinements, the 8.9 million Austrians have, on paper, the ban on going out except for shopping, sports or for medical care. It is also possible to go to the office and drop the children off at school, but the authorities have called for them to be kept at home.

Faced with the surge in cases which have reached unprecedented levels since the start of the pandemic, the government first targeted the unvaccinated, banning them from public places and then imposing exit restrictions on them.

The vaccination rate is “shamefully low” (66%, against 75% in France for example). Vaccination of the adult population will thus become compulsory on February 1, 2022, which very few countries in the world have introduced so far.

The reaction was quick: on Saturday, while a crowd of Austrians drank a last mulled wine or did their shopping before the shops closed, around 40,000 people took to the streets to cry out for “dictatorship”, at the call of the far-right party FPÖ.

130 arrests in the Netherlands

For the third night in a row, unrest broke out in the Netherlands on Sunday. Protesters fired fireworks and caused widespread damage in the towns of Enschede, near the border with Germany, in Groningen and Leeuwarden in the north and Tilburg in the south.

These latest demonstrations were, however, less intense than the violence that erupted in Rotterdam on Friday and in The Hague on Saturday. The number of arrests over the three days of protests stands at 130, according to police and local media.

The government has aroused anger by reintroducing partial containment, with a series of health restrictions affecting in particular the restaurant sector, which must close at 8:00 p.m. He now plans to ban certain places for non-vaccinated people in an attempt to stem the wave of contamination.

Mandatory teleworking in Belgium

In Brussels also, clashes punctuated Sunday the gathering of some 35,000 demonstrators, according to the police, opposed to new measures. Belgium has announced the generalization of the wearing of masks and also wants to make teleworking compulsory for jobs that allow it in order to stem the strong rebound of the epidemic in the country.

And in the French department of Guadeloupe, in the Caribbean, the challenge to the vaccination obligation for caregivers has degenerated into a major social crisis. Police reinforcements arrived, after a night from Saturday to Sunday again punctuated by violence, between roadblocks, fires and looting.