Cost-of-living protests spread across France and other European countries

France is not in the grip of a mysterious force called “the cost of living.” It is looking at the bill. Emmanuel Macron surveyed fuel prices, a slide in purchasing power and streets that had already produced fires, looting and vandalism, and reached for a conflict in the Persian Gulf — a war France, he was careful to note, is not even fighting. A shock in the oil market is real. Using it as an alibi is a choice.

The alibi works only if you forget the decade before the headline. Europe treated abundant energy as a moral problem and dependence as a rounding error. France, which still has the serious nuclear fleet the rest of the continent only talks about, did not escape the habit: reactors delayed or closed, fuel taxed as if the car were a vice, gas security treated as someone else’s department. Nuclear electricity does not fill a tank. Oil does. When a Gulf war moves the price of the one thing that moves the country, a president who spent years adding policy to the pump does not get to play the innocent bystander. His planned tour of Gulf capitals to “secure” fuel and gas is not a diplomatic triumph. It is the foreign policy of a state that outsourced a basic condition of ordinary life and wants credit for the flight.

October 17 made the politics legible. Students, climate activists, farmers and former Yellow Vests in the same current. Some of that current is owed a hearing. The Yellow Vests were never a seminar. They were the France outside Paris saying that a fuel tax is not virtue when the car is how you reach a wage. Farmers watching energy and input costs eat the margin are not asking for a riot. They are asking why the state that regulates them into thin margins now acts astonished that they have had enough.

The rest is a fraud on those people. Climate activists marching against the cost of living are marching against the invoice for their own demands. You cannot spend years insisting that fossil energy must become more expensive and then borrow the anger of the household that just discovered you meant it. And the disorder — the fires, the looting, the vandalism — is not a footnote. Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu accused ultra-left groups of organizing it ahead of the presidential election. Take that as an allegation if you like. The burned street is not an allegation. A republic that lets militants turn a purchasing-power crisis into pre-election arson, and then lets commentators file the arson under “protest,” has confused compassion with surrender.

Lecornu’s 2027 budget at least stops pretending the deficit is a mood. A civil-service pay freeze and tighter sick-leave reimbursement will be denounced as cruelty. They are the smallest available concession to arithmetic in a country where the state is the largest industry and the bill is still growing. The alternative is not kindness. It is the kindness already on offer: inflation, a weaker wage, and a government that postpones the reckoning until the street sets the date. More spending, more controls, more blame for anyone but the governing habit — that is how the invoice got this long.

The same habit links Paris to the marches in Italy, Spain, Portugal and Albania. Not a sudden continental temperament. Energy priced as penance. Then, when people notice, a speech about external shocks.

The Right should not romanticize the crowd because the crowd embarrasses Macron. Order is not optional, and a looted shop is not a macroeconomic indicator. The argument worth making is plainer: produce and secure the energy, stop spending as if the deficit were someone else’s character flaw, and stop allowing the authors of the price rise to pose as its victims. Purchasing power does not come back because a bus burned. It comes back when the state can keep people moving without a foreign permission slip — and can still tell a citizen who is tired of the bill from the militant who came to light it.