Brussels shopkeepers board their own windows ahead of feared repeat looting
Prada and Tiffany hide behind plywood a week after Rue Neuve was stripped, the market prices state protection at zero and pays in advance
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Brussels shops boarded up amid fears of repeat of last week's looting
euronews.com
Luxury boutiques and ordinary retailers across central Brussels spent Saturday screwing wooden panels over their display windows, one week after looters stripped stores along Rue Neuve and clashed with police through the city centre.
Tiffany & Co., Prada, Versace and Ferragamo covered their frontages, alongside Lacoste, Nike and Nespresso — and smaller operators including an optician and a phone repair shop. Shops around Avenue Louise, Porte de Namur and Rue Neuve reinforced their premises after calls circulated on social media for a fresh gathering on Saturday. Some clashes did eventually break out, but they were limited compared with the previous week, when police met rioters with tear gas and water cannon.
The boards were not purely defensive. Several businesses kept trading: Nike left an uncovered doorway for customers, and a Quick restaurant displayed a small "open" notice on its boarded frontage. Pedestrians and traffic moved past largely undisturbed. The precautions were a forecast — the shopkeepers' own assessment, in plywood, of what the state's protection was worth on a Saturday night.
The pattern has a logic that no municipal security plan can quite replicate. A looted boutique absorbs the loss directly; the officials who announce a crackdown absorb, at most, a press cycle. So the people with the till at stake acted a week in advance, and the city's shopping streets spent the weekend advertising, in boards, what they expected their government to prevent.
Brussels is not alone in the calculation. Parisian shopfronts closed ahead of the same weekend's demonstrations as police fired tear gas and water cannons, and France has now logged around 2,400 arrests in its weeks of unrest. In Brussels, the mayor's next security plan is still a document. The plywood is already up.