German and Turkish police clashed with demonstrators on Friday as huge crowds angered by the worst global recession in decades took to the streets worldwide for traditional labour day rallies.

In Germany, on course for its biggest slump since World War II, Berlin police made 49 arrests as young demonstrators hurled bottles and rocks and set fire to cars and rubbish bins in the early hours.

On Friday tens of thousands of people gathered for May Day rallies across Germany and police were bracing for pitched battles later in the day with far-left demonstrators.

"No one could have imagined that this crisis could have been so profound," Michael Sommer, head of the DGB trade union federation, told a cheering crowd in Berlin.

"There is no light at the end of the tunnel."

Planned far-right rallies and counter demonstrations were also expected to result in unrest that has been a feature of 1 May for 20 years in Germany. In Berlin 5000 police were standing by with water cannon, tear gas and batons.

In Turkey, several hundred demonstrators battled riot police in central Istanbul, with protestors chanting "hand in hand against fascism", "repression won't stop us" and "long live the revolution and socialism".

Turkish riot police staged three charges against hundreds of demonstrators in the Sisli district of the city who had hurled rocks at security forces. At least eight were injured, including two police officers, NTV television said.

Rallies were held around the world, with organisers everywhere promising to highlight public anger over the crippling recession which has seen millions lose their jobs.

In France, tens of thousands turned out across the country in a fresh show of force against President Nicolas Sarkozy's handling of the economic crisis, six weeks after as many as three million took to the streets.

In what unions predicted would be the biggest Labour Day turnout in decades, marchers paraded in the cities of Paris, Marseille, Bordeaux, Grenoble and elsewhere.

France's eight main trade unions have agreed to hold united rallies across the country – rather than hold rival May Day events – for the first time since the end of World War II.

"Work, not death," said a banner in Grenoble carried by workers from the German car parts maker Schaeffler, which is soon to close a plant in the area, as they marched behind colleagues carrying a coffin.

In Spain, where the government expects nearly one in five workers to be out of a job next year, large crowds of demonstrators gathered in central Madrid, and in Austria, a large crowed gathered in front of Vienna city hall.

In Tokyo, some 36 000 people rallied in Yoyogi park, demanding more welfare benefits and others protesting military spending, with many more youths and people in their 20s joining the event than in recent years.

In South Korea, some 8000 workers and students rallied in a Seoul park urging an end to lay-offs and wage cuts caused by the crisis. There were also rallies in Manila, the Cambodian capital Phnom Penh and Taipei.

In Russia, about 2000 demonstrators gathered by a statue of Karl Marx in Moscow waving banners and red Soviet flags and calling for a return of communism.

In Russia's second city Saint Petersburg, birthplace of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, police arrested about 100 members of far right and anti-immigrant groups who tried to demonstrate in the centre, an AFP correspondent witnessed.

And in Italy, leaders of the main unions held their rally at the town of L'Aquila in a show of solidarity after the devastating earthquake there last month which killed nearly 300 people.

AFP