Thousands of police, firefighters, teachers and other civil servants marched through Barcelona Wednesday to protest against spending cuts made by the regional government of Catalonia.

The demonstrators marched behind a large black and white banner that read “No to the cuts. Save Public Services” from the central Plaza Sant Jaume to the Catalan parliament, where lawmakers were debating the budget for 2012.

Over 10,000 people took part in the protests, according to the Catalan government, but union officials put the figure at 30,000.

Before the start of the protests, about 50 uniformed firefighters blocked the street in front to the Catalan interior ministry and covered it with white foam normally used to battles blazes.

Like other Spanish regions, Catalonia is under pressure from the central government to help bring Spain’s deficit down and make sure the country does not get dragged into the debt crisis mire that has already forced Greece, Ireland and Portugal to seek financial bailouts.

Last year the regional government of Catalonia headed by the centre-right Catalan nationalists CiU put in place budget cuts totaling one billion euros ($1.3 billion) which hit public health care hard and sparked street protests.

In November the Catalan government, called the Generalitat in Catalan, announced it was planning further austerity measures for 2012, including cuts to civil service pay, higher taxes on gas and higher university tuition.

It aims to save 625 million euros with the new austerity measures.

“We are trying to make sure that the Generalitat does not sink,” the head of the Catalan regional government, Artur Mas, told the region’s parliament before the start of the march.

“If we don’t do the things that we must do, better times will not come.”

Spain’s central government has set a target for the budget deficits of the country’s 17 regional governments at the end of 2011 of 1.3 percent of their gross domestic product.

But Catalonia, which has its own distinct language and often adopts an adversarial relationship with the central government in Madrid, set its own deficit target for the end of 2011 of 2.66 percent of its output.

Spanish Finance Minister Cristobal Montoro said Tuesday that the central government will introduce a new law which will punish regions that fail to meet their deficit targets.

The central government blames the regions for swelling the country’s overall public deficit, which ended 2011 at about 8.0 percent of GDP, above the 6.0-percent target Madrid agreed with the European Union.

It has vowed to meet the 2012 goal of reducing the deficit to 4.4 percent of GDP, even if that means finding a way to lop an estimated 40 billion euros off the budget.