A specter is haunting Europe, and plenty of other places too. Nobody knows quite what to call it. It isn’t the specter of communism this time around, or at least not under that name — although something approaching class warfare, redefined in 21st-century terms, is on the agenda for the first time in decades. 

Student protests that began at secondary schools in the northern suburbs of Paris about a month ago have sparked a wave of demonstrations and street battles— occasionally tipping over into rioting, looting, and organized property destruction — that has now spread to at least six or seven countries, with new outbreaks happening nearly every day. But there is no single unifying issue that has brought students, labor unions, left-wing activists, anarchist rebels and hundreds of thousands of ordinary people into the streets of Paris, Lisbon, Madrid, Brussels, Milan, Belgrade, Athens and Tirana, among many other cities. 

While the protests in Belgium and Italy are direct outgrowths of the French student movement, the proximate causes of unrest are local and distinct in every case. Protests in Spain and Portugal reflect years of simmering discontent over the soaring cost of living, especially a housing crisis made worse by the explosion of Airbnb-style tourist rentals. In Greece the protests were initially about workplace safety and public sector wages. In Albania and Serbia, where protest movements were well underway before the French students made headlines, the main issues involve deeply entrenched government corruption. 

Thousands of miles away in the world’s largest self-described democracy, India’s youth-driven Cockroach Janta Party (“Voice of the Lazy & Unemployed”) isn’t connected to the French protests at all, except by the kind of historical coincidence that isn’t really a coincidence. The CJP was launched earlier this year, about halfway between political satire and social media experiment, and by midsummer became a mass movement that has shaken the autocratic Hindu nationalist government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi to its foundations. 

Given this diversity and the tangential connections between all these events, it’s almost easier to say what the protest wave of 2026 is not about than to define it precisely. No dramatic world-historical event has catalyzed all this, and for the most part these protests are happening in relatively prosperous, relatively peaceful and nominally democratic nations. We’re not on the cusp of global financial or economic crisis, at least not yet, although there are troubling warning signs. There is no immediate threat of military conflict or civil warfare in any of these countries, although Russia’s war in Ukraine, Israel’s murderous war in Gaza and the spectacularly mismanaged U.S. war with Iran have all fueled the rising sense of collective outrage. 

To use one of this decade’s most overused words, the outrage seems existential. It’s about everything everywhere all at once or, to more cynical observers, about nothing in particular. It’s about underfunded schools, crumbling infrastructure and soaring rents, and also about Gaza, climate change and the enforced spread of AI, data centers and government surveillance. 

Ironically enough given its origins, the outrage is also being driven by a highly literate and globally connected generation, one that is sufficiently well educated to perceive the underlying conditions that have made those things happen. They see paralyzed centrist governments held captive by bankers and tech billionaires; they see an economy built on worsening inequality, systematic insecurity and what sociologists call “elite overproduction” (e.g., university graduates working as baristas); they see the climate crisis addressed only with bland rhetoric or regulatory fiddling as one deadly heat wave follows another.

What the protests of 2026 are not about, to any measurable degree, is skin color or religion. Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Benjamin Netanyahu and far too many of their fellow travelers have seized on the disorder in Europe as evidence of the pernicious effects of “open borders” and Islamic immigration. It’s a losing proposition to quote stuff that the president of the United States says on social media and then feign outrage, as if we were actually surprised. But we are where we are: France is being “conquered, looted and burned to the ground by migrants, jihadists and communists who hate Christianity,” Trump informed us via Truth Social last week.

That fantastical framing tells us a lot more about him and his supporters, needless to say, than about the remarkably diverse crowds in the streets of Europe’s major cities. But the tempting prospect of blaming immigrants for the protests or the acts of violence — maybe not as the primary cause and way below the Trump level, in an effort to fend off critics on the right — has created a kind of acid test or moral hazard for political leaders and media commentators. The pass/fail ratio is both depressing and mildly surprising.

Embattled German Chancellor Friedrich Merz and the newly-installed Hungarian Prime Minister Péter Magyar, for instance, have failed the test, both suggesting that “high rates of migration and a failure to integrate the foreign-born are partly behind the sudden, violent upheaval,” to quote this week’s leading editorial in the Economist. So did New York Times opinion columnist Frank Bruni, an alleged liberal who began his breezy Oct. 22 discussion with right-winger Bret Stephens by stating the unquestioned premise that “a velocity of religious, racial and ethnic diversification over the past quarter century that has exceeded what many longtime residents could easily make sense of and comfortably adapt to” had somehow led to angry high school students and window-smashing anarchists in French cities.

As for French President Emmanuel Macron, bête noire of the protest movement, perhaps he has decided to go down fighting in the last six months of his largely disastrous decade in power. For all his arrogance and hubris, Macron is no racist and has decried the “stupid comments” by foreign leaders he declines to name, who claim that France has been “invaded by hordes of migrants and Islamists, which is completely false.”

But the most forceful rejection of current racist narratives about the European protests, and perhaps the best single summary of why they are happening in the first place, comes, improbably enough, in the above-quoted leading editorial in the Economist:

Even if some young protesters in France wear Algerian football shirts or chant pro-Palestinian slogans, the upheaval in Europe today is not about race or religion. Over 500,000 people marched in France on Saturday [Oct. 17] and they were largely unmasked and white. They were fired up, as in other countries, by the cost of living and poor public services. They want more fuel subsidies, more spending on schools, more handouts.

Leaving aside the buzzword “handouts,” which is meant to signal the innate laziness of the non-wealthy, that’s some straight-up gospel preaching. As the editorial confesses, once upon a time the Economist enthusiastically backed Macron as the golden boy of neoliberal reform, but now he and other “head-in-the-sand centrists” seem to be “out of ideas.” Strikingly, the editorial has no new ideas to offer.

In a Foreign Policy essay last week, former Estonian president Kersti Kaljulaid defines the central problem in Europe, plausibly but rather too vaguely, as “intergenerational hopelessness” and a downward spiral of economic expectation. Once again, the Economist — which can fairly be described as the house organ of global capital — goes at the issue far more directly. Demonstrators on Europe’s streets, its editorial proposes, are “consumed by rage”:

Rage at the failure of the state and against the floundering centrist politicians who govern. Rage at high prices and economic dysfunction. And for some, rage against the idea of centrist politics at all.

Go on with your bad self! It’s not irrelevant or accidental that the call, as they say in horror movies, is coming from inside the house. No one can credibly accuse the Economist of being soft on Marxism or unfaithful to free-market dogma (that same editorial mocks leftist French presidential candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon, not inaccurately, as an “aging rabble-rouser and onetime Trotskyist”). That gives it the freedom to state plain facts that so-called moderates like Merz and Bruni would rather avoid: Yes, “centrist politics” have visibly failed, not just in France but across the Western democracies. Indeed the entire system or basket of principles known as “liberal democracy” is in big trouble, and on the verge of systemic failure. 

“Liberalism” in that context is not an ideological label in the contemporary American sense but a term from old-school political economy, used to describe the forced marriage in Western nations between market capitalism, parliamentary democracy, and a varying list of civil rights and civil liberties. Liberalism in that sense has dominated most of the world since the Cold War, and until recently it encompassed both major political parties in the U.S. I hardly need to convince you that is no longer the case, or that proudly illiberal parties and leaders have emerged and spread throughout the Western-style democracies, like an unpleasant but unkillable fungus. (As this article was published, it appears that Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Brazil’s leftist president, has defeated Flávio Bolsonaro — the son of imprisoned former president Jair Bolsonaro — ending a string of six consecutive right-wing victories across Latin America. True to form, Bolsonaro called for the results to be annulled.)

Liberal democracy was a roaring economic success for most of the 20th century, at least in broad strokes and with some well-known caveats. Oddly enough, those bygone glory days are pretty much what Trump keeps promising to bring back, to no visible effect. But the current crisis of liberalism is nothing new. It began to unfold decades ago, well before Francis Fukuyama proclaimed the “end of history.” Today’s enraged French students — and their parents, teachers and neighbors, for that matter — have inherited a world of false promises and diminished expectations. 

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Real wages have steadily declined in most Western countries (including our own) since the 1970s, allowing for a brief uptick during the technology boom of the 1990s. Across the liberal democratic zone, social services have been slashed in one “austerity” budget after another while government debt has soared. Rapidly aging population has made large-scale immigration a necessity, while right-wing demagogues have seized on the new arrivals as the main cause of the economic problems that immigrants can ameliorate. The result almost everywhere has been an accelerating vicious cycle of political dysfunction and public disillusionment, fueling the rise of what the Economist calls “charismatic figures from the extremes,” meaning Mélenchon and Marine Le Pen in France, and no doubt Zohran Mamdani and You Know Who over here. 

As a leading Marxist scholar told me decades ago, every radical who confidently predicts the collapse of capitalism is always wrong. If and when that ever happens, no one will have expected it. The same is likely true of liberal democracy today, which has survived worse crises than this and still retains broader popular legitimacy than is visible at this moment. Students in Milan and Marseille and Mumbai may well return to school and be reconciled to their lives, at least for now. But they have shown us something: There are dark passages ahead and enormous changes coming, and none of us can accurately identify the specter who blocks the path forward.

The post Why are young people so angry? Why isn’t everyone? appeared first on Salon.com.

France has become the new sick man of Europe just in time for its next presidential election.

After two weekends that saw hundreds of thousands of protesters hit the streets demanding the government increase teacher salaries, fix run-down schools and help subsidize the rapidly rising cost of living, the European Union’s second-biggest economy is being dragged into a vicious cycle of twin fiscal and social crises that are fueling each other.

“France is on the brink of a financial crisis,” former Prime Minister Michel Barnier told POLITICO. “We need to send a signal to the markets.”

Authorities were able to prevent the type of rioting and looting this past weekend that marked the first round of demonstrations Oct. 17-18, but financial markets are spooked. Even before the demonstrations began, investors were dumping French debt or demanding historically high returns because of the government’s failure to significantly cut a stubbornly high budget deficit, bring down €3.5 trillion of debt, jumpstart growth and reform an unsustainable pension system.

The prospect of a presidential runoff next spring featuring far-right front-runner Marine Le Pen and her far-left rival Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who is in the mix for second place according to most polls, is further scaring investors. Both candidates want to spend billions to lower the retirement age.

The rioting, for now, is estimated to have cost tens of millions of euros, much of which will be covered by insurance. But the chaos is pouring fuel on an already explosive situation by sending worrying signals to investors, especially if the civil unrest continues. The Yellow Vest protests of 2018 to 2020, which came early in President Emmanuel Macron’s tenure, cost the French economy 0.1% of gross domestic product, with shops reporting losses of €2 billion.

“It is clear that protests have an impact on markets,” Eric Lombard, who served as economy and finance minister last year, told POLITICO.

Given that current Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu’s proposed budget for 2027 already includes €43 billion in savings, leaving little room for more cuts, the government is faced with an impossible choice: Borrow more money and saddle the next generation with billions of euros in interest payments, or hope the protests die out on their own.

“We have a knife to our throats, and we can feel the drops of blood on our jugular,” said a government minister who was granted anonymity to discuss the current situation.

“We need to show that we’ve heard the outrage. But we have little margin for maneuver given the market situation.”

Playing with fire

Mario Monti, who faced a similar situation as Italian prime minister and managed to avert a financial crisis in 2011 with spending cuts and a pension reform, told POLITICO that “things can go very fast.”

Back then, the spread between Italian and German 10-year bonds — an indicator that measures how risky one country’s debt is compared to historically safe Germany — shot up from around 150 basis points to more than 500 within a few months, Monti recalled. The spread between French and German debt was 169 basis points when markets closed on Friday, while the yield on France’s benchmark 10-year bond hit 5.14% the previous day, the highest level since 2002.

France has long been seen as the EU’s “spoiled child,” Monti said, taking advantage of its political and economic weight to bend or break the bloc’s fiscal rules. But few had thought a country that big and powerful would end up on the front line of a European debt crisis.

While the ability of the European Central Bank to buy government bonds on the secondary market under certain conditions gives it a powerful tool to avert a eurozone crisis, Monti says French voters must recognize that a sovereign debt crisis in their country is no longer the stuff of fiction.

“The major problem is that the public is not concerned enough with this risk,” Monti said. “France is not psychologically ready to view itself as the target of a crisis or even as the starting point of a crisis that could spread.”

That malaise isn’t just economic: Many indicators show France has lost confidence in itself.

According to a poll last month, 9 out of 10 French people are pessimistic about the future and believe their children will be worse off than themselves. A pan-European study conducted earlier this year found that only half of French respondents feel pride in the democratic system, compared to two-thirds of Germans and close to 70 percent of Britons.

That pessimism has pushed voters toward more extreme candidates like Le Pen — whose economic platform has been panned by some economists as unrealistic and unserious — and Mélenchon, who wants to set French debt “on fire.” According to POLITICO’s Poll of Polls from earlier this month, Le Pen enjoys the support of 34% of voters while Mélenchon has 15% — meaning nearly 50% of the electorate intends to vote for an anti-establishment figure. Center-right candidate Edouard Philippe, arguably the best-placed mainstream figure to take on Le Pen, has tried to sell himself to voters as a candidate of fiscal discipline who is unafraid to address tough truths. But his campaign has struggled to find its footing.

Doom loop

The officials, lawmakers and diplomats POLITICO spoke with all agreed that France was not at risk of a Greece-like scenario forcing the government to stop paying officials and creditors. But it could very well experience a crisis similar to the one in Italy when Monti replaced Silvio Berlusconi in 2011.

“We are not yet a banana republic which risks filing for bankruptcy,” said veteran centrist lawmaker and budget expert Charles de Courson.

But during rioting earlier this month, in front of the shattered window of an already ransacked supermarket in Paris’ hipster 11th arrondissement, a man with no apparent connection to the shop was encouraging passers-by to go in and steal what they needed. A few meters away, the owner of a Chinese restaurant locked the door behind each client to make sure the rioters couldn’t get in.

These are scenes one would expect in a country on the verge of a sovereign debt crisis, not a member of the G7. Watching from Brussels, Washington or New York, diplomats and economists recognize that Paris will likely fail to bring its budget deficit down to 3% of GDP by 2029 as it previously promised to the EU.

De Courson said France has “lost all credibility” with its European partners when it comes to fiscal issues. Lombard, the former economy minister, said “we failed to honor our commitments,” but held out hope that things could change.

“On behalf of the French people, we made commitments to get the finances back on track, but we didn’t keep them. I was very much in favor of honoring my commitments. But collectively, we didn’t do that,” Lombard said. “So we put ourselves in a position of weakness.”

PARIS — French President Emmanuel Macron has instructed local authorities to ban protests on Saturday except those organized by unions, he said Thursday.

Any request to “protest” or “regroup” made by people “who have no legitimacy to do so” will be “refused,” Macron said after a security meeting with Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu and intelligence services.

The aim, he added, is to maintain public order and “protect businesses” after last week’s turmoil in France.

Hundreds of thousands of demonstrators took to the streets, while incidents of vandalism and looting affected thousands of businesses and public buildings on the sidelines of the protests.

Calls for a fresh round of protests have already begun to emerge online, raising the possibility of a protest movement that becomes a weekly occurrence, as was the case during the 2018-2019 Yellow Vest movement.

“The president believes that six months before a presidential election, debate should take place more in TV studios, in newspapers, and ultimately by the choice at the ballot box,” a person close to the French president said.

Trade unions usually hold talks with local authorities ahead of planned demonstrations. For Saturday, authorities may offer “alternative routes” to ensure maximum security, Macron announced.

He added that he will chair a defense council Friday and announce “new decisions” afterward.

Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez said elite tactical police units and a military unit normally deployed on French soil for counterterrorism operations would also be mobilized this weekend.

The government has been accused of mismanaging last week’s protests by significantly underestimating the number of demonstrators and consequently failing to deploy enough police to prevent criminal acts on the sidelines.

A protest organized by a major trade union Saturday in Paris has been approved, French media reported, while all protests in the area including Lyon, one of the country’s biggest cities, have been banned.

PARIS — French President Emmanuel Macron will leave the Élysée Palace in about seven months, and the cost of his departure is already being budgeted.

France’s draft budget for next year, currently under discussion in parliament, includes a €2.3 million provision to help Macron move into furnished offices, according to a parliamentary report first obtained by POLITICO. The sum also covers rent, service charges and security for the next six years.

Former French presidents receive a range of lifelong benefits, including a pension, offices, a chauffeur and police protection. For the first five years after leaving office, they can also employ up to seven staff members, a number that drops to three thereafter.

Despite the budget allocation, Macron does not yet appear to have found his next place of work. The Elysée told POLITICO the provision was a “precautionary measure … based on the experiences of previous presidents.”

Nicolas Sarkozy and François Hollande are the only two living former presidents currently benefiting from the arrangements — even though Hollande has since returned to parliament as a lawmaker.

Hollande said last month that he is receiving a monthly pension of €5,000 for his time at the Élysée, on top of pensions from previous roles and his current income.

Macron, the youngest president in modern French history, will be 49 when he leaves office and has pledged not to draw his presidential pension.

He has kept his plans for life after the presidency close to his chest, leaving unclear to what extent he intends to remain involved in politics. Although he is constitutionally barred from seeking a third consecutive term, he will be eligible to run for president again once his successor takes office. He has not ruled out the possibility of doing so.