May day protests highlight Europe's pain Workers across Europe took to the streets on Tuesday for annual May day rallies, with extra law enforcement officials deployed in many cities as tens of thousands demonstrated against painful government spending cuts and rising unemployment. The marches take place against a revived debate over whether austerity measures being implemented across the European continent will suffocate economic growth. Twelve European countries are in recession - meaning they have suffered at least two consecutive quarters of negative growth - including Spain, Portugal, Ireland, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium, Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Slovenia, Denmark and the UK. In Spain, where unemployment has risen to 5.6m, or 24.4 per cent of the workforce, the rightwing government led by Mariano Rajoy faced a wave of anti-austerity rallies across the country as trade union opposition mounted against a programme of painful public spending cuts to reduce its budget deficit. Following a general strike called in late March that saw skirmishes on the streets of Barcelona, Spain's unions have organised more than 80 May day marches against Mr Rajoy's labour market reforms. Extra police have been deployed on to the streets of Barcelona ahead of a meeting of the European Central Bank's governing council on Thursday, and security checks at the French border have been heightened to prevent protesters arriving from abroad. Rallies in Portugal were due to start at 13.30 GMT, while in Greece, around 2,000 people marched through Athens to protest the government's adherence to a tough austerity programme insisted on by international lenders. Parades in Paris were dominated by the campaign for Sunday's French presidential election, as separate rallies by President Nicolas Sarkozy and Marine Le Pen, leader of the extreme right National Front, challenged the traditional trade union-led demonstrations by the left. Mr Sarkozy, who needs to win over National Front voters to outstrip the opinion poll lead held by François Hollande, his socialist challenger, appealed for "tens of thousands" of his centre-right supporters to come to his "celebration of work" rally near the Eiffel Tower organised to counter the union-dominated May day marches. He travelled instead to visit the home of a Pierre Bérégovoy, a distinctly moderate Socialist prime minister who committed suicide on May 1 in 1993. The National Front was holding its May day rally to mark the birth of national heroine Joan of Arc, whose 600th anniversary falls this year. By Miles Johnson in Madrid, Scheherazade Daneshkhu and Hugh Carnegy in Paris, Esther Bintliff in London and agencies