Over the past two weeks, a generation of French school students has taken to the streets in protest against a school system blighted by inequality.
Amid terrifying incidents of heavy-handed policing, teenagers from across social classes and across generations have railed against dilapidated schools, poor education and an increasingly bleak economic future, as our editorial spelled out.
Paris correspondent Angelique Chrisafis has been on the streets of the French capital all week. In Thursday’s First Edition newsletter she told Libby Brooks how wealthy pupils had joined the barricades, outraged about rats, gaping ceilings and leaking toilets in poorer schools. A teacher interviewed by Angelique told her that the scale of the protests “flies in the face of the idea that they’re part of a social media generation who are selfish and narcissistic.”
In a great episode of Today in Focus, Angelique joined Nosheen Iqbal to explain how the roots of the protest can be traced to years of austerity from the Macron government.
In Spain, a deeply unbalanced housing market has triggered a wave of protests. This week centre-left prime minister Pedro Sánchez called a snap general election after rightwing parties blocked emergency legislation to protect access to housing. Sam Jones looked at what the public outcry would mean for Sánchez’s chances of staying in power.
The protests were sparked by the eviction of María del Carmen Abascal, an 87-year-old woman, who had lived in her Madrid apartment for more than 70 years before being forced out by a real estate company wanting to quadruple her rent. She died on Wednesday, two weeks after her eviction. Ashifa Kassam, our European community affairs correspondent based in the city, explored how Maricarmen, as she became known, was made into the face of the protests in this brilliant explainer video and, on Wednesday, reported from the encampment in Puerto del Sol square where protesters are demanding measures including rent freezes.
Our Europe editor Jon Henley tied the threads between what has unfolded in Spain and France this week in a sharp piece of written analysis. The protests, wrote Jon, “may stem from different specific grievances, but these two waves of mainly youth-led protest exemplify a growing problem for western European governments: a generation of young people feeling increasingly denied the basic socioeconomic security that, by and large, their parents enjoyed.”
It’s a sentiment that will become more and more politically important across the world as economies stagnate and entry-level jobs are swallowed by AI. We’ll continue to document how this cross-generational anger reshapes our politics.
