A teachers' strike in a Paris suburb has grown into a general strike in six weeks, and Germany's Generation Z has taken to the streets against conscription. Behind the water cannons and smashed storefronts lies a question that Paris and Berlin have no money to answer: who will pay for the debt, the rearmament, and the expensive energy?
The high school in Créteil, a modest suburb southeast of Paris, bears the name of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. In the second half of September, its teachers went on strike over a chronic shortage of colleagues, students barricaded the entrance with garbage bins, and parents stood alongside them. Less than a month later, on October 17, France lived through one of its most violent Saturdays in the streets since the Yellow Vests. According to the Interior Ministry, 441 protests took place across the country with 550,000 participants; the unions counted 800,000. By Monday morning, the ministry reported 2,628 arrests and more than 1,100 injured police and gendarmes. City Hall in Limoges was on fire. One protester was reported killed.
Two weeks later, on October 31, Germany's young people took to the streets. During the day, more than thirty cities saw peaceful marches with signs opposing compulsory military service. By evening, in Frankfurt am Main, Molotov cocktails were flying at police, and stores on the main shopping street were being looted.
It is tempting to blame it all on inflation, school bureaucracy, or a Halloween crowd looking for any excuse. That explanation suits governments, but it contradicts the facts. For the first time in a decade and a half, Europe's young people have presented the state with the entire bill: for schools, for rent, for gasoline, and for the right to decide whether they will serve in the army. The two pillars of the European Union do not yet have an answer.
The Little Prince High School: How One Teachers' Lounge Set the Fifth Republic on Fire
The formal trigger was a mundane staffing gap. In French schools, a class canceled because no substitute teacher is available has long been treated like the weather, and a class of 35 in the suburbs no longer surprises even the inspectors. What surprised everyone was the speed.
Videos from Créteil spread across social media within days. By October 1, according to the Interior Ministry, the movement had reached 1,027 of the country's roughly 3,700 high schools, 222 of which were blockaded. In a single week, police detained more than five thousand people. Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez declared that the blockades were "akin to urban violence" and bore little resemblance to ordinary protest. The prime minister's office publicly blamed Jean-Luc Mélenchon's France Unbowed. Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu, speaking in the National Assembly, rejected accusations of police repression and pointed out that more than 715 police officers and gendarmes had been injured.
The government tried to seize control of the agenda and on October 6 launched an online consultation called Agora, where, until October 23, students could anonymously describe their grievances. The results read like a verdict on the ministry. Some 31.1% of participants named absent teachers who are never replaced as the main problem. Another 24.6% pointed to overcrowded classrooms, 22.3% to stress over Parcoursup, the national platform that assigns graduates to universities, and 15.8% complained that no one listens to them.
This is the nerve center of the French crisis. For decades, the Republic sold the public school as a social elevator, the only one that was truly free and equal for all. Families in affluent neighborhoods have long plugged its gaps with private tutors and private high schools. A teenager from Créteil has nothing but the public high school. When it stops working, the Republic's very myth of equal opportunity collapses, and with it loyalty to the state that tells that story.
54 Billion in Savings: The State Cuts Everything but Debt Interest and the Army
The school protest might have fizzled out by the November break. The budget would not let it.
On September 17, Lecornu announced an "effort" of roughly 54 billion euros, and on October 1 he submitted the 2027 finance bill to the Council of Ministers. The prime minister's reasoning was blunt: without savings, the 2027 deficit would approach 6.5% of GDP. The target is 5%, compared with 5.4% in 2026. Lecornu himself prefers a different figure, 4.8%, which excludes the new increase in military spending. That accounting detail says more about priorities than any speech.
Central government spending is frozen at 2026 levels, which, after inflation, amounts to an actual cut. Only two items are exempt from the freeze: debt service and the armed forces. The government refused to raise taxes on households and companies but allowed higher pensions to be indexed below inflation. According to the Economy Ministry's forecast, public debt will rise from 115.6% of GDP at the end of 2025 to 119.3% in 2026 and 121.7% in 2027, while interest costs will grow by about 10 billion euros next year. The Finance Ministry acknowledges that the debt burden can be stabilized only once the deficit returns to 3%, a goal postponed until 2029. France has already become the third most indebted country in the eurozone, after Greece and Italy. Spain, which Paris until recently condescendingly called the problem child of the south, brought its debt below 100% of GDP this summer.
Now overlay these figures on the energy backdrop. Since February 28, when American and Israeli strikes on Iran escalated into war and Tehran closed the Strait of Hormuz, through which about a fifth of the world's seaborne oil trade passes, European fuel prices have been in a state of shock. The April ceasefire proved fragile. France's nuclear power softened the blow to electricity prices, but it does not protect the gas pump: crude oil accounts for about a third of the price of a liter of gasoline, with the rest going to refining and taxes.
The result is a simple picture for a student in Créteil. There was money for the army, and money for interest to the banks, but there is none to replace a math teacher who is out sick. One can explain all day long that defense is the state's constitutional duty and that debt must be serviced. To a seventeen-year-old, these explanations sound like the bookkeeping of someone else's war.
Black Saturday: The Minister Himself Called It a Failure
On September 29, the public sector went on strike, with an estimated 300,000 participants. Then the high school students were joined by the revived Yellow Vest movement, which had returned to the streets in late September. For the first time, young people and the Yellow Vests synchronized their calendars. The result was October 17.
What followed is well known from the footage that went around the world. A fire on Boulevard Haussmann, looted luxury boutiques a few hundred yards from Place Vendôme, City Hall ablaze in Limoges, clashes in Marseille and Nice. According to the government, about three thousand stores were damaged; chambers of commerce counted about two thousand. The Marseille prefecture claimed 30,000 looters, including eight thousand active rioters. The city's mayor disputed this estimate, and his skepticism appears well founded: after a failure, prefectures have every incentive to exaggerate the scale of the threat. Economists put the total damage at nearly a billion euros, comparable to the summer riots of 2023 that followed the death of the teenager Nahel in Nanterre.
The key question was why the police were caught unprepared. That day, the Interior Ministry deployed 60,000 police and gendarmes. By comparison, on December 8, 2018, at the height of the Yellow Vest movement, the state mobilized 89,000. According to opposition politicians, intelligence services expected about 100,000 protesters, meaning they were off by a factor of five.
Nuñez did not hide behind careful wording. On October 19, on the air, he acknowledged a "lack of foresight" and a "loss of control," and then submitted his resignation. Emmanuel Macron refused to accept it and demanded a new law enforcement doctrine. A week later, the minister called the events of October 17 a "monumental failure." Such candor is rare for the French security apparatus, but it came at a high political cost. Nuñez's resignation was demanded simultaneously by the National Rally and France Unbowed, two camps that usually agree on nothing.
It is important here to draw a line that both sides have erased. The hundreds of thousands of people who marched through Paris with signs about wages and class sizes did not burn down City Hall in Limoges. The looters on Boulevard Haussmann were not demanding reform of Parcoursup. The government has an interest in lumping the former together with the latter; the radical left has an interest in ignoring the latter. The protest itself pays the price for this conflation: after October 17, discussion of schools and wages nearly vanished from television screens, giving way to coverage of the rioting.
Twenty-Eight Per Class: A Concession That Came a Month Too Late
On October 24, the state struck back. With the same 70,000 security personnel deployed, according to the Interior Ministry, 289 protests took place with 410,000 participants, 110,000 of them in Paris; the unions again claimed 800,000. The minister's final tally: 1,435 arrests, 267 injured police and gendarmes, 150 injured protesters, two in serious condition in Toulouse and Reims, and another in Clermont-Ferrand. Nuñez called the day "under control." The numbers suggest otherwise: it looked under control only in comparison with the previous Saturday.
On October 26, Minister of National Education Édouard Geffray and Minister of Higher Education Philippe Baptiste unveiled a package of measures. Tenth-grade classes will be capped at 28 students beginning in September 2027 in the most disadvantaged half of high schools, and in all public high schools from 2028. The 2027 budget includes 500 new teaching positions to meet this standard. By 2027, there will be 15,000 additional places in higher education, including 10,000 in technical education programs, 4,000 in university institutes of technology, and 1,000 in medical fields. The hated Parcoursup will be replaced with a new system by 2028, something Macron had already promised high school student organizations on October 23. On October 28, Lecornu repeated these commitments from the rostrum of the National Assembly.
High school and university student organizations responded that this was not enough and called for continued mobilization. They have a point. Five hundred positions in a system where thousands of classes go uncovered for months look like a drop in the bucket. But the main issue lies elsewhere: every new euro for schools will have to be found within a frozen budget, meaning it will be taken from hospitals, transportation, or local governments. The government is trying to put out one fire by throwing logs on the next one.
On October 31, the Interior Ministry again deployed 70,000 police, warning prefects of a "very high risk" of overnight unrest on Halloween. According to official figures, 320,000 people took to the streets; organizers put the number at about half a million. Some 779 people were arrested, and the ministry included in its tally Halloween incidents unrelated to the demonstrations. The turnout curve has been heading down: 550,000, 410,000, 320,000. It is too early to conclude that the movement is fading, because the next date belongs to the unions.
November 5: France Tries On May 1968
On October 5, a united front of the CFDT, CGT, Force Ouvrière, UNSA, and FSU signed a call for a cross-sector strike on November 5. The demands concern wages, pensions, the civil service pay index, ecological planning, and tax fairness. In French politics, the mere fact that the moderate CFDT and the militant CGT have signed the same text is an alarm bell. After a fruitless meeting at the prime minister's residence on October 21, CGT General Secretary Sophie Binet went further and called for a general strike at every workplace starting November 5. For the first time in history, all four unions of private Catholic schools operating under contract with the state have joined the strike. The four unions of the national railway company SNCF have formed a united front.
The parallel with May 1968 suggests itself. Back then, student unrest in Nanterre and at the Sorbonne grew within two weeks into the general strike of May 13, and by the end of the month, by various estimates, seven to ten million people were on strike. General de Gaulle dissolved the National Assembly on May 30 and won the snap elections in June in a landslide. The street won a month and lost at the ballot box. French politicians remember that lesson better than the slogans of that spring.
There is also a more recent precedent. In 2006, Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin pushed through parliament the "First Employment Contract," which made it easier to fire young workers. Several weeks of mass protests by university and high school students forced the government to withdraw the law in April. That was the end of Villepin's presidential ambitions, and in 2007 the Élysée Palace went to Nicolas Sarkozy, who built his campaign around law and order. Lecornu, incidentally, has already said he will not run for president and has called his budget "reversible" after the election. A prime minister who has announced his own impermanence is poorly suited to negotiating with a generation demanding guarantees for years to come.
Who Will Ride the Wave of Riots Into the Élysée Palace
The presidential election will take place in April 2027. Macron, having served two consecutive terms, cannot run, so a new occupant of the Élysée Palace is guaranteed whatever the outcome.
Polls over the past year paint an alarmingly stable picture. The National Rally candidate, whether Marine Le Pen or Jordan Bardella, leads the first round in every scenario tested. A September IFOP poll showed Le Pen holding first place even after the scandal surrounding Bardella that arose from press reports in late September. A March Elabe poll gave Bardella a second-round victory over Mélenchon by 71.5% to 28.5%. Pollsters name former Prime Minister Édouard Philippe as the only candidate capable of competing for a spot in the runoff against the National Rally.
The fall crisis is paying dividends to both poles. France Unbowed became the only major party to openly support the high school students and gained a base of young activists that others can only dream of. The National Rally gained something more valuable for an election: footage of burning storefronts. To a voter who fears for the corner shop, school problems seem secondary. Every looted street works for the party of order more effectively than any campaign ad.
The center finds itself in the worst position. It has nothing to offer the left because there is no money, and nothing to impress the right because the police lost on October 17. My forecast: through the end of January 2027, not a single major national poll will show a candidate capable of outpolling the National Rally's candidate in the first round.
Gen Z Regelt: TikTok Declares War on Conscription
The German movement grew not out of a teachers' lounge but out of a smartphone. In October, an account appeared on social media under the slogan Gen Z regelt, which translates roughly as "Gen Z will handle it." The organizers openly cited France, Belgium, and Spain, where school and university unrest had broken out, as their models. Protests were initially announced in 21 cities, then in 23, and by Saturday the list had passed thirty. By October 27, more than 135,000 people had signed up on the movement's website to take part, and about 145,000 by the eve of the protest.
The demands are set out in a two-page manifesto: better education, accessible health care, climate protection, and a life people can afford. A separate point addresses what the authors see as a growing surveillance apparatus. The central slogan reads: "No to conscription. No one decides our future without us."
Here lies the main difference from France. French high school students are arguing with the state about money; German ones are arguing about the state's right to dispose of their lives. In 2011, Germany suspended universal military service. Since January 1, 2026, the Military Service Modernization Act has been in force. All young men born in 2008 or later must fill out a questionnaire about their health, education, qualifications, and willingness to serve; for young women, the questionnaire is voluntary. Service itself remains voluntary for now, but the law contains a mechanism allowing the Bundestag to introduce compulsory conscription if there are not enough volunteers, which means the state already knows everything it needs about every eighteen-year-old to send him a draft notice one day without further formalities.
For someone whose youth fell in the final years of the Soviet Union, this tone is familiar. The state demands service and loyalty from the young but stops explaining what it will give in return. Back then, the gap between obligations and promises proved fatal for an entire system. The Germany of 2026 is incomparably more robust, but the mechanics of distrust work in a similar way.
The movement's weakness is as clearly visible as its energy. Amy Kirchhoff, secretary general of the Federal Conference of Student Councils, stated publicly that it is not really clear who is behind the initiative, and her organization did not support the October 31 protests. One of the co-organizers, Akram Selo, disavowed any violence in advance. A movement with no legal entity and no registered leaders can easily gather a crowd. It does not know how to keep that crowd under control.
Night on the Zeil: How a Peaceful March in Frankfurt Ended in Looted Storefronts
The Frankfurt demonstration was registered by a local group, Generation Aufbruch, which expected 11,500 participants. About eight thousand came. Hesse's Interior Minister Roman Poseck had warned even before the protest that he would not tolerate people concealing their faces behind Halloween masks. He called the overlap of the protest with the holiday unfortunate and summed up the problem briefly: Halloween is one thing, a demonstration is another.
At around 6:20 p.m., police dispersed the march, citing its "non-peaceful character." From there, events unfolded according to a script all too familiar to European cities: smashed windows on the Zeil, the city's main shopping street, burning barricades, Molotov cocktails thrown at police, and tactical units cordoning off the area around the shopping arcades until morning. According to Poseck, up to 1,300 police officers were deployed at the peak, more than a hundred of them were injured, and one lost teeth after being hit in the face by a rock. Seventeen stores were damaged, five were looted, and 54 people were arrested. Police estimated the number of active rioters at 1,000 to 1,500.
That last figure deserves attention. The rioters made up roughly a sixth of the daytime demonstration, yet it was their actions that determined how the day would be remembered. In Cologne, police were attacked on the cathedral square near the train station. In Berlin, bottles and firecrackers were thrown at police: 27 officers sustained minor injuries, and 56 people were arrested. Hamburg saw burning barricades. The police union, which had warned before the protests that the far-left scene would try to exploit the youth marches, drew a mixed conclusion: during the day the protests were very peaceful; at night the picture changed. The initiative itself, after rejecting violence, announced new nationwide protests.
Frankfurt has its own memory. On March 18, 2015, the day the European Central Bank opened its new headquarters, the anti-capitalist alliance Blockupy brought out about 20,000 people. Police cars burned, and the number of injured exceeded two hundred. The city where eurozone monetary policy is decided has once again become the stage on which a generation argues with those who count the money.
A Chancellor at Ten Percent
The German protests landed on ground that was already cracking. The October edition of the monthly national poll conducted by Infratest dimap for public television from September 28 to 30 among 1,303 voters recorded a historic low. Just 10% of citizens are satisfied with the government's performance, and the same share with Chancellor Friedrich Merz's. The CDU/CSU and SPD coalition started out in May 2025 with 40% approval. The Alternative for Germany stands at 27%, while the CDU/CSU bloc is at 20%, its worst result since September 2021. About half of respondents fear they will be unable to maintain their current standard of living. The Alternative first overtook the conservatives in this poll back in May.
The economic backdrop explains these fears better than any pollster. According to a preliminary estimate from the Federal Statistical Office published on October 30, annual inflation in October was 2.8%, after 3.3% in September, the highest since December 2023. Energy prices rose 12.2% year over year, after climbing as much as 14.9% in September. The slowdown reflects not an improving situation but a renewed cut in the fuel tax as of October 1. For a homeowner in suburban Munich, such numbers are merely unpleasant. For a twenty-year-old renter in Berlin who spends half his earnings on housing, they mean giving up on an independent life.
The political crossroads here is more complex than in France. The demands of Gen Z regelt, from the climate agenda to rejecting conscription, are textually closer to the platforms of the Left Party and the Greens. But the images of the Frankfurt night work in favor of those who promise order and a hard line on migrants. Young people who came out against the establishment risk electorally enriching the very force that most of the demonstrators themselves would vote against.
Guns Instead of Desks: The Conflict Europe Is Afraid to Name Out Loud
For all their differences, the French and German crises share a common root. The postwar European model was an unspoken contract between generations: the young work and pay into the system, and the state guarantees them affordable education and confidence that their children will live no worse than their parents. Today, that structure is being squeezed by four presses at once. An aging population is swelling pension costs, the energy shock is driving up prices, debt is eating the budget through interest payments, and rearmament demands money immediately.
The last press is the newest and the most painful. At the June 2025 summit in The Hague, NATO allies agreed to raise defense and related spending to 5% of GDP by 2035. Germany amended its constitution back in March 2025, exempting military spending above 1% of GDP from the debt brake. France exempted the army from the budget freeze. To be fair, Berlin simultaneously created a 500-billion-euro infrastructure fund, part of which will go to schools, and the threat Europe is arming against is quite real. The problem lies elsewhere: governments have never explained to young people why the constitution can be rewritten for tanks, but not even a budget line can be rewritten for teachers.
Intergenerational statistics make this discontent measurable. According to European statistics, in 2025, 26.3% of young people aged 18 to 24 in the EU were at risk of poverty or social exclusion, compared with 18.8% of those over 65. In September 2026, youth unemployment stood at 15.5%, against an overall rate of 6.2%. The older generation owns property and holds protected jobs; the younger one rents and waits in line. Formally, they have equal rights. In practice, starting positions are determined by family wealth, and the state, which was supposed to smooth out this gap, is now asking the young to pay off other people's debts and, if necessary, to put on a uniform.
Protest is spreading across Europe faster than before, and social media is merely an accelerant. In Belgium, police in Liège detained more than a hundred students in the week beginning October 1, and unrest also broke out in Italy and Spain. Digital contagion works only where there is fuel of its own. German youth would have taken to the streets even without the French example, just later.
For governments, this is a new kind of protest. With a union, one can sit down at a table, sign a protocol, and go home. With a networked movement in which one person demands wages, another fights conscription, a third rails against rents, and a fourth wants to change the entire decision-making system, there is nothing to sign. That is why even real concessions from Paris failed to stop the mobilization: the demands cannot be reduced to a budget line; they are about trust.
What Comes Next: Four Dates That Will Show Who Won This Fall
The first date is November 5. The scale of the general strike will show whether the alliance of high school students and unions can repeat 1968, or at least 2006. I expect the Interior Ministry to count more participants than on October 31, but fewer than the 550,000 who turned out on October 17. If the railways shut down for several days, the government will have to bargain not over class sizes but over civil servants' wages.
The second date is December 31, the deadline for adopting the budget. Lecornu has no majority in the National Assembly, and the street has made every line of savings toxic. My forecast: the bill will not pass in its original form with 54 billion euros in savings. Either the figure will shrink, or the country, as in December 2024, will enter the new year under a special stopgap finance law instead of a full budget.
The third date has not yet been set: the next nationwide Gen Z regelt protest. A movement with no structure and no budget lives only as long as the emotion holds. If the Bundestag does not trigger the compulsory conscription mechanism in the spring of 2027, the German protest will most likely break down into local initiatives, leaving its mark above all on how young people vote.
The fourth date is April 2027, the first round of the French presidential election. That is where we will learn what these weeks were converted into: social reforms or a mandate for a hard line on order. The experience of May 1968 suggests the second outcome is more likely.
In Lieu of a Conclusion: Responsibility for Those We Have Tamed
This fall, European governments have learned that they can put 70,000 police officers on the streets. They have yet to find out whether they can offer twenty-year-olds anything besides police cordons and promises of a "reversible" budget. So far, there is no answer in either Paris or Berlin.
Saint-Exupéry, whose name is carved on the facade of the high school in Créteil, left behind a line every French schoolchild knows: you become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed. The Fifth Republic tamed generations with the promise of a free social elevator and a life better than their parents'. On November 5, the students of Créteil will take to the streets alongside railway workers and Catholic school teachers. At the entrance to their high school, there will most likely once again be garbage bins pushed together into a barricade beneath the plaque bearing the name of the author of The Little Prince.