When teenagers take to the streets because their schools lack teachers, the first official response ought to be an answer. France's was a threat. President Macron promises that looters will pay, which is fair enough, and that the government will seek to bar demonstrations organized by people or groups without "legitimate authority." Ask who decides who is legitimate, and you have the whole problem.
A movement that began with students complaining about empty classrooms and crumbling buildings is now being told its organizers lack standing. Students do not hold a license to protest. Neither do the nurses, the rail workers, the pensioners, or the parents who cannot make a salary last until the end of the month. A democracy cannot decide who counts as an authorized complainant, and a government that tries has told you how it hears complaints: as disorder to be managed.
The pundit complaint will be that this movement has lost focus, drifting from school funding to wages, pensions, prices and inequality. I think it has found its focus. Teacher shortages, stagnant pay, a retirement age raised in 2023 without a parliamentary vote, and a cost of living that keeps winning are one story. The state has told its citizens for years that there is no money, then sent the bill to the people least able to pay it. A fifteen-year-old in a school with no math teacher understands this better than a Finance Ministry spreadsheet. It is her future being rationed.
That is why the broadening matters. Macron has governed by technocratic certainty and procedural shortcuts, and he has spent years treating dissent as a communications failure. Now the bill arrives in the street. Over 1,000 arrests do not make a policy, and tear gas does not fill a teaching post.
Then there is Donald Trump, who looked at France and saw immigration. It is the all-purpose diagnosis from a man who would blame immigration for a rainy Tuesday. Notice the rest of the story: unrest in Belgium, Italy, Spain, Greece and Albania, with demonstrators citing education cuts, corruption, public services and living costs. Albania is a country people leave, not a magnet for arrivals. Whatever links these protests, it is not a border policy. It is a continent whose governments have asked ordinary people to absorb austerity while promising stability they cannot deliver. Macron was right to call Trump's remark exploitation. He should be equally wary of his own habit of reading every uprising as a problem of order.
The Left should not get off lightly either. Violence and looting are not liberation. They wreck the shops and neighborhoods of working people and hand an unpopular president the one story he wants, which is that the protesters are the danger. Movements that win keep the moral high ground and stay organized. The French Left, divided among parties, unions and a leaderless youth surge, has too often been chasing a crowd it should be giving direction. Unions bringing wage and pension demands into this moment is the right move, but only if it produces concrete demands rather than a bigger parade.
And the demands are not mysterious. Hire and pay teachers. Repair the schools. Tie wages to prices. Reopen the pension question that was closed by decree. Tax the wealth that has done fine through every crisis. None of this needs a new theory of society.
A government that answers a school protest with a ban on unauthorized protest is confessing that it has no answer to the school problem. The young people in the street are not the threat to the republic. The threat is a political class that thinks a generation should be grateful for a deficit target.
How it may affect me
If you are traveling in France, expect possible disruptions to transport and city-center access on protest days, especially if unions join in larger numbers. Check strike notices and local advisories before booking or departing.
