Austria experienced its third weekend of protests against measures taken in the face of the Covid-19 epidemic. Tens of thousands of people demonstrated on Saturday, December 4, against the measures decided by the government to stem the new epidemic wave in the country. Foremost among these controversial decisions: vaccination which will be made compulsory from February.
According to media reports, entire families with children had made the trip and crossed all of Austria to demonstrate in Vienna on Saturday.
Several arrests were made for disturbing public order, according to the police who identified “More than 40,000” demonstrators in Vienna, after several rallies in the capital. Police say some protesters threw “Pyrotechnic devices” on the police who responded with the use of pepper spray.
The number of contaminations decreases
Hostility to partial containment and compulsory vaccination is encouraged by the far-right FPÖ party, which accuses the 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 Covid-19 constituted “At the moment the most important threat for us”.
Austria has been experiencing, since November 22, a new partial confinement in force until December 11. It is also the first country in the European Union to have decided to resort to compulsory vaccination. The government has defended these measures by citing a fourth wave of Covid-19 cases which is putting 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 less than 10,000, without the measure reaching unanimity.