Cars burnt, police hurt in French election violence

Hundreds of people were arrested in France overnight in clashes between police and protesters who torched cars following conservative Nicolas Sarkozy's victory in Sunday's presidential election, police said.
Official figures released early on Monday said demonstrators set fire to 367 cars and injured 28 policemen across France, and 270 people were arrested in the violent protests against the tough-talking former interior minister.
Reports and eyewitness accounts suggested the violence was worse than the official statistics indicated because they did not include other incidents such as petrol bomb attacks on buses near Paris or smashed up shop fronts in large cities.
The final national tally was also at odds with local figures. Paris officials said 33 policemen were injured in the capital, five more than the national total cited by police.
Leftist sympathizers clashed with police in Paris's Bastille Square after Sarkozy's comprehensive victory against Socialist Segolene Royal and security forces fired repeated rounds of tear gas to break up the crowd.
Youths went on the rampage in adjoining streets, smashing phone cabins and shop windows as they moved towards the nearby Gare de Lyon station.
"Everyone got hit. We heard people were at the Bastille but we didn't expect them to come up here," said Sophie Wolkowitch, whose pharmacy near the station had its windows smashed and suffered 14,000 euros ($19,000) of damage.
Similar attacks were reported in the southeastern city of Lyon and the southern city of Toulouse. Bus shelters were smashed in the northern city of Lille and a school was set on fire in the Paris suburb of Evry.
In the northern department clustered around Lille, about 100 cars were torched, the fire brigade said.
Sarkozy made his name as a law-and-order hardliner who also tightened France's immigration laws, making him a hate figure for the left. Slogans spray-painted on the streets of Paris overnight included "Sarkozy fascist."
He is also a controversial figure in France's poor and multi-ethnic suburbs, where nationwide riots erupted in 2005.
At the time Sarkozy branded the troublemakers as scum.
Socialist candidate Royal said last week a Sarkozy victory would provoke violence in the suburbs, but an internal police memo obtained by Reuters said there was no large-scale trouble in those areas overnight.
"The second round of the presidential election did not generate any large demonstrations of urban violence in sensitive neighborhoods," the memo said.
It added that the level of violence was above that usually seen on July 14 Bastille Day, France's national holiday "but below that of New Year's celebrations."
Source: Reuters