Liège closes its station approaches as student marches pick up France's tuition fight

Hundreds of students marched in Liège on Wednesday over the cost and conditions of French-language education in Belgium, and the city treated the march as a riot risk. Belgium's BE-Alert system told shopkeepers that major unrest was under way and that they should close. Police told people to avoid the centre because traffic was severely disrupted. Liège's main station, Guillemins, was closed and later reopened, local media reported.

The Belga news agency put arrests in recent days at 107, linked to property damage and arson. Local authorities had not confirmed that figure when Reuters published. Videos circulating from the city showed shattered glass, fires, and police blocking roads. The students' own signs, photographed at the march, read as a complaint about a right treated as a privilege, and about education costs set against hunger.

A tuition figure from June

The immediate grievance is the French-speaking Community's fee schedule. In June, clashes in Brussels followed a reform that lifted tuition for most students in that system from 835 euros to 1,194 euros, about 1,280 dollars. Students in Liège also cited overcrowded classrooms and trouble getting study materials. The marchers told reporters they were watching the school blockades in France, where the interior ministry counted 256,000 people on Tuesday's marches and unions counted 450,000.

The French protests and the Liège marches are not the same dispute. France's row, in its third week, has been about school conditions, with the prime minister citing 215 injured teenagers and 85 injured staff. Belgium's row has a published fee increase and a language community, not a national ministry, as the authority that set it. The students have chosen to treat them as one wave. Authorities in Liège have chosen to treat the copy as a public-order problem.

A station, a warning, an unconfirmed arrest count

Guillemins is the city's rail door, the Santiago Calatrava hall that takes trains to Brussels and into Germany. Closing it, even for part of a day, is a heavier step than a campus cordon. BE-Alert is the federal warning tool. Using it to tell shops to shut moves the incident off the university page and onto the city's. Police posts asked people to stay out of the centre. Those are the operational facts. The 107 arrests remain a Belga figure awaiting a police confirmation that had not arrived on Wednesday afternoon.

What the fee buys as an argument

A rise from 835 to 1,194 euros is 359 euros a year, about 43 percent, for most students in the French-speaking Community. That is the number the June reform put on paper, and the number Liège marchers are still carrying in October. Overcrowding and missing materials are harder to price, and they are the part of the complaint that does not depend on the fee line. France's injury count gives the Belgian students a neighbouring example of how large a school march can become, and gives Liège police a reason to shut a station before they know the size of Thursday's crowd.

The city reopened Guillemins. The fee is still 1,194 euros. The arrest total is still an agency figure. The next march will show whether Wednesday was the spillover of a French week or the start of a Belgian one with its own tuition arithmetic.