Europe marches against austerity

Vast crowds marched through Lisbon and Madrid on Saturday. The Spanish demonstration ended in violence when police baton-charged protesters who refused to disperse after midnight.

And about 50,000 people rallied in central Paris today against the EU's Fiscal Stability Pact - dubbed the "permanent austerity treaty" by opponents as it hands power over governments' spending to unelected EU officials.

Left Front leader Jean-Luc Melenchon told marchers: "This day is the day the French people launch a movement against austerity."

Organised denied the march was targeted at Francois Hollande's Socialist government, but Mr Hollande has courted controversy by agreeing to force the controversial pact through parliament.

Many of his own MPs have pledged to vote against it but it is likely to pass with the support of the right.

The Paris crowds chanted: "Resistance, resistance," but in Madrid protesters were clearer about what they wanted to happen to ministers: "Fire them."

Mariano Rajoy's government has pushed through crippling attacks on welfare and public servants in order to convince Brussels it can be trusted with a multibillion-euro bailout for the country's private banks, whose property speculation sunk the Spanish economy.

More than one in four people are unemployed and Saturday's police brutality marked the third time in a week that police and protesters have fought on Madrid's streets.

In Lisbon a crowd estimated at "tens of thousands" demonstrated against the neoliberal agenda of Pedro Coelho's government, which has also slashed spending in return for a €78 billion (£60bn) EU bailout.

Retired bank worker Antonio Trinidade said: "The government and the troika (the EU, IMF and European Central Bank) controlling what we do just want to cut more and more and rob from us.

"The young don't have any future and the country is on the edge of the abyss."

Several thousand Belgians took an anti-austerity protest to the heart of the EU bureaucracy in Brussels today.