Riot police in Geneva fired tear gas and water cannon at stone-throwing youths on Sunday as a march against the G7 summit, held across Lake Geneva in the French town of Évian, descended into clashes that stretched into the evening.
An estimated 20,000 people joined the afternoon demonstration, organised by a "No-G7" coalition of more than 60 associations, trade unions and left-wing groups that said it aimed to denounce "fascism and imperialism." Most of the march was peaceful, but a violent standoff broke out along the route after a car was set ablaze and the windows of a bank were smashed.
Authorities had braced for disruption for days. Swiss police closed roads in downtown Geneva and boarded up shopfronts, and public transit and cross-border train service between France and Switzerland were heavily disrupted from mid-afternoon on Saturday.
Switzerland reintroduced temporary controls at its internal borders with France from June 10 to 19 and closed 25 of the 35 road crossings between the two countries, snarling traffic in both directions as leaders and delegations arrived for the three-day summit.
Thousands of Swiss and French police were deployed across the frontier region to secure the summit perimeter in Évian, a spa town of about 9,000 on the southern shore of the lake. Organisers chose Geneva — Switzerland's hub of multilateral diplomacy, directly opposite Évian — as the focal point for protest because access to the summit town itself was sealed off.
Anti-G7 demonstrations have accompanied the summit for decades, and the lakeside setting placed this year's protests within sight of the meeting they targeted. Geneva authorities said they would maintain a heavy security presence through the close of the summit on Wednesday.