While France, Belgium, Italy and Albania saw rioting, the protest wave reached Portugal, Spain, Greece and Austria through union marches, housing encampments and student tent camps. Established communist parties are openly participating in these protests.
The parties’ own documents show cross-border coordination, including a Greek communist delegation marching in Paris and plans for a Europe-wide youth strike on November 20.
In Portugal, the CGTP, the country’s largest union confederation, called the October 17 demonstrations in Lisbon, Porto and Coimbra. The Portuguese Communist Party (PCP) announced that its general secretary, Paulo Raimundo, would join the Lisbon march with a PCP delegation.
Two days earlier, Raimundo was asked about the housing encampments in Porto. He said the party supports all such actions expressing indignation over housing. Left Bloc coordinator José Manuel Pureza and Livre spokeswoman Isabel Mendes Lopes also spoke at the march.
Popular assemblies run the housing encampments in Lisbon’s Rossio square and Porto. The Lisbon assembly voted unanimously to ask union confederations to call an “Iberian general strike” on November 11.
In Spain, housing protests began alongside the French movement, including an encampment in Madrid’s Puerta del Sol. After Congress rejected two housing decrees, the tenants’ union Sindicato de Inquilinas called marches in about 50 cities on October 3. The government delegation counted 70,000 participants in Madrid, while organizers claimed 500,000.
Izquierda Unida, a coalition that includes the Communist Party of Spain, announced on September 29 that it would participate in the mobilizations on October 3 and 4. It said its members were active in the tenants’ unions, platforms and assemblies organizing against evictions.
Under pressure from the Sindicato de Inquilinas and the anarcho-syndicalist CGT, the CCOO and UGT agreed to a 24-hour general strike over housing and wages. It will be the first since 2012 backed by both confederations.
On October 14, the first day of an indefinite education strike in Madrid, police charged a student picket at Complutense University and detained five students. The Organización Estudiantil Socialista (OES) and the Coordinadora Juvenil Socialista (CJS) demanded that the charges be dropped and called for the government delegate’s resignation.