French riot police take up positions amid clashes with student demonstrators (Reuters)
These are the protests of a generation that believes that its future has been robbed of it, after the collapse of the social contract that its parents knew, which guaranteed them, in return for hard work, housing, a family and a better standard of living.
Afrasianet - Thomas Fazi - "Unherd" British website publishes Articles It addresses the wave of youth protests in several European countries, from France and Italy to Germany, Spain and Serbia, considering that it reflects the crisis of a generation that feels deprived of its future due to the neoliberal economic policies adopted during the past decades.
The article highlights the rising cost of living, declining job opportunities and public services, and the widening economic gap between generations, in contrast to increased European spending on armaments and financing the war in Ukraine. It also discusses the reasons why some protests have turned violent, criticizing the European right's reduction of their causes to immigration, and pointing to their economic, social, and political roots.
The following is the text of the article:
Across Europe, young people are revolting. Student protests in France have attracted the most attention, particularly because of the violence they have descended on, including riots, looting, and setting fire to public buildings. But recent weeks have also seen young people take to the streets in a string of other countries, and in some cases violent, as in Italy, Spain, Portugal, Belgium, Greece, Ireland, Germany, Austria and others. Meanwhile, a student movement in Serbia, which spent two years on the streets, won a general election, ending Aleksandar Vucic's long rule.
The immediate causes of the protests may vary, from schools in France and Belgium, to the housing crisis in Spain and Portugal, the rising cost of living in Italy, corruption and a combination of past factors in Serbia, but their roots are the same. These are the protests of a generation that believes its future has been taken away from them. It's a conclusion that's hard to dispute. The social contract that the fathers of this generation knew, based on the idea that hard work will, at a minimum, guarantee, a better standard of living, has collapsed. For many young Europeans who have not inherited wealth, adulthood has meant moving from one precarious job to another, with barely enough income to cover rent and food, let alone start a family. That is, if they can find work at all. At the same time, these young people have watched the institutions that were supposed to help them get started in life and alleviate their difficulties, such as schools, universities, health services, and youth services, deteriorating under austerity and privatization policies.
To be sure, young people have disproportionately borne the brunt of neoliberal policies over the past decades. It is widely acknowledged that neoliberalism has pushed inequality to unprecedented heights, but less attention is paid to the fact that inequality is increasingly becoming generational. Geopolitical analyst Arnaud Bertrand recently published some very striking statistics on France, where people over the age of 60, who make up about a quarter of the population, own nearly 60% of the country's wealth. They also receive about two-thirds of the French government's total social spending, in the form of pensions funded by younger generations under the current system. This constant transfer of wealth from younger generations to older generations is all the more surprising when you consider that the average income of a French pensioner is now higher than that of a worker.
Although the protesters often define themselves openly from a generational perspective, as is especially evident in the German movement's slogan "Gen Z regelt," which can roughly be translated as "Gen Z takes over," their demands are not framed as directed against the elderly. And that's certainly the right approach. Blaming the baby boomer generation would be a mistake. They were simply lucky, growing up in an era of full employment, affordable housing, and decent pensions. And there are no It is reprehensible that older societies are spending more money on older people. Moreover, much of that wealth is concentrated in the hands of a small minority of baby boomers; it is clear that not all older people live luxurious lives. After all, the problem is not that pensions are too high, but that young people are deprived of what their parents took for granted.
The generational divide is only how those who have come of age after workers have already lost a class war waged against them from above for decades, and who have inherited a political and economic system designed to move wealth upwards, experience the consequences of that war. In Europe, this system has been entrenched in the same institutional structure, from the euro to the Maastricht Treaty and financial rules, a structure that systematically favors asset owners over wage earners, and workers who are stable in their jobs over new entrants to the labor market.
"There is no doubt that young people have disproportionately borne the brunt of the neoliberal policies of the past decades."
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The mechanisms that led to this are well known. A decade of quantitative easing policies have inflated the value of real estate and financial assets owned by older people, at a time when wages have stagnated, depriving young people of the opportunity to own homes. Labor market reforms, from the Trio package and Italy's jobs law, to Germany's Hartz and France's Khmer law, have maintained job security for those already in the labor market, while pushing newcomers into a spiral of temporary and increasingly fragile contracts, under the guise of "flexibility."
After 2010, the burden of austerity fell disproportionately on education, youth services, and public investment. Existing pensions were largely protected, while future pensions were quietly reduced. As a result, government spending on older people rose across Europe, while public investment was sharply curtailed. Then came the pandemic, which deprived Gen Z of years of education, work, and social life, followed by an inflationary wave exacerbated by an energy shock that European leaders were largely responsible for causing themselves.
As if all that wasn't enough, today young people are being asked to accept further cuts and deteriorating living conditions to make room for rearmament and an open-ended war, which seems to always have money to fund. Just a few weeks ago, while French police were firing tear gas at teenagers, EU leaders tasked the European Commission with finding an additional €70 billion for Ukraine in 2027, on top of the €45 billion already allocated.
Financial rules that have never been relaxed for schools or hospitals are now being circumvented in favor of defense spending, through national exceptions and co-borrowing for weapons. Young people have taken notice. They report that there is no money for their classrooms, while billions of new ones are being made available for the looming never-ending war – Ukraine – a war in which they may even be asked to fight, as conscription returns to the European agenda. In many countries, young people are beginning to openly link the cost-of-living crisis to the trend towards rearmament.
The real question is not why the youth are rising up, but why it took them so long to do so. The economic roots of these protests are undeniable, but do they tell the whole story?
Instead, most conservative commentators have focused on the participation of second-generation young people of Arab and African descent, and their prominent role in violence and looting, particularly in France, but also in Italy. For a large segment of the right, the riots only confirm what has been saying for years: mass migration has been a disaster by any measure, filling European cities with a predominantly Muslim marginalized class that shows no interest in integration. In the crudest version of this narrative, this group is portrayed as intent on destroying the very fabric of Western civilization, in some cases with the help of the "far left." The demands of the protests, which have been mostly peaceful and overwhelmingly, fall largely unheeded.
Herein lies a striking paradox. The populist right does not stop complaining that a "globalized governing establishment" has impoverished Europe and stripped it of its industrial base. Yet, when young people take to the streets, sometimes violently, to protest against this very institution and the results of its policies, it is unable to believe that they have real grievances. Instead, it instinctively assumes that there are those pulling the strings behind the curtain: the Islamists, Antifa, or Mélenchon.
It is true, of course, to distinguish between the peaceful protests demanding economic reforms and the riots and looting that accompanied them. There is no doubt that a large part of the looting, in France as in Italy, involved second-generation immigrants, from the French suburbs and the marginalized outskirts of Italian cities, without a clear ideology behind these acts. There is also no point in denying the costs of mass migration, from public safety issues to pressure on public services. It is clear that many of those who participated in the violence were acting opportunistically.
The growth of segregated societies with different social and religious backgrounds, often living in conditions of extreme exclusion, is clearly a social ticking time bomb, which has already done serious damage to social cohesion. Those on the left who deny this fact are no less narrow-minded than their counterparts on the right, who focus on it alone and exclude everything else.
It could be argued that mass migration has itself been part of neoliberal social engineering in recent decades, particularly through the creation of a stock of cheap labor. It can also be argued that rioters wreaking havoc during peaceful demonstrations are harming the cause of the protesters themselves, overwhelming their demands, and giving the security forces a pretext to wage a crackdown. There have even been allegations that the French police deliberately allowed acts of destruction to take place to justify mass repression.
All of these arguments are valid. But they raise an obvious question: Why do protesters angry about the status quo not direct their anger at these migrants, but often side with them? Have they simply been blinded by a naïve leftist ideology? Or is there something deeper than that?
They are more likely to be waging their struggle primarily from a generational perspective that transcends ethnic, and, to some extent, class divisions. This explanation seems far more convincing than the theory of "left-wing Islamism" (islamo-gauchiste), which holds that this trans-ethnic alliance is not a spontaneous solidarity at all, but rather an alliance engineered by leftist parties, such as Jean-Luc Mélenchon's Father France.
This may be true to some extent in France, but it does not apply to Italy, where there is no Italian counterpart to the Father France party, no similar alliance between the left and Muslim voters, and yet the same mixed crowds have appeared in the streets, as has happened elsewhere.
However, reducing violence to the participation of second-generation immigrants alone is also misleading, and too convenient. Young people of European origin have also participated. The recent riots in Milan included young people whose parents were born in Italy, as well as others from immigrant families.
We must therefore wonder to what extent this violence is also a reaction to a regime that offers no avenue for political change. This is not meant to justify violence, because violence in itself does not lead to any liberation.
But we cannot escape the disturbing fact that a regime that is becoming increasingly authoritarian, that is effectively committed to obstructing any radical democratic change in the regime, in which there are no intermediary social forces between the authorities and the masses, and no forces capable of giving the uprising a political direction and content, and placing it within the framework of a guided idea based on social liberation, must generate violence.
There are also harsh generational calculations: young people are a minority in every European society, and they cannot win elections on the basis of a platform based on generational affiliation alone.
"When individualism, lack of purpose, anxiety and despair become the norm, we should not be surprised if the result is mass depression or outrage."
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But the violence, especially the senseless looting, also expresses a deeper state of social ill that goes beyond the economy. It reflects the nihilistic vacuum into which Western societies have sunk.
At a time of moral decay at all levels of Western societies, particularly among their political and corporate elites, which systematically show little respect for human life or the property of others, is it not somewhat illusory to expect the younger, most disadvantaged groups to adhere to moral standards higher than those of their rulers?
Writing about the 2011 riots in England, the German social psychologist Guts Eisenberg described young people as the "surplus generation", the generation that society no longer needs, whose work can be dispensed with, who has been denied the opportunity to build an independent life through their own efforts, while still being fascinated by the constant promises of self-realization through consumption, a situation that is increasingly out of reach.
Fifteen years later, his diagnosis seems more relevant than ever. Indeed, Britain is still a social powder keg that could explode again at any moment.
Violence is not a solution to social problems, but it does not arise out of a vacuum either. When political and economic power becomes anonymous, anger turns to the closest concrete symbols, such as a Louis Vuitton store. It is possible to break a storefront, but financial markets or austerity policies cannot be shattered.
However, we should not make the mistake of assuming that the protesters represent an entire generation. The same generation that fills the streets is also voting in increasing numbers for the anti-immigration right. In France's 2024 elections, one-third of voters under the age of 25 voted for the National Rally, and in Germany, more than a quarter of young males voted last year for the Alternative for Germany (AfD).
The anger at the ruling establishment is the same, but it is directed in the opposite political direction. The question is whether European politicians, whether they are in power or their "populist" rivals, have any real answers.
Addressing the grievances of the protesters requires a radical change in the system, including increased public investment in education and housing, higher wages, more stable jobs, and economic redistribution of wealth, with a focus on the true wealth monopolies, rather than retirees in general, and the adoption of a rational energy policy, which in itself requires a radical shift in the prevailing geopolitical paradigm.
But it is hard to imagine how any of this will be achieved within the current structure of the European Union and NATO, which no major party seems willing to challenge.
At the same time, the idea that the problem of young second-generation immigrants who feel alienated can be solved through more severe repression, or perhaps even "repatriation," is nothing more than an illusion.
The question is whether Europe's youth can replicate what happened in Serbia. It is a country facing a much similar demographic reality, an aging and declining population, yet its student movement has built a program that has attracted support from different generations, in part by moving away from traditional ideologies and uniting around a simple, nonpartisan message calling for change.
Ironically, this seems more difficult to achieve today in the "liberal democratic" West than in a country that is frequently described as authoritarian.
Source: Unherd
