This autumn I have found myself watching the evening news from Europe with a growing sense of recognition. Not of the tear gas or the burning barricades, which I deplore, but of the faces. Teenagers holding hand-painted signs. University students sleeping in tents in city squares. Young people who look, more than anything, tired of waiting.
What began in mid-September as French high school students protesting teacher shortages and overcrowded, crumbling classrooms has become something much larger: nationwide marches against the cost of living, now into a third consecutive weekend.
And it has not stayed in France. Italian students have occupied schools and marched under the banner “Let’s reclaim our future”. In Spain and Portugal, young people have pitched tents to protest against rents they cannot pay. Belgian students are resisting education cuts and higher tuition fees, and Greek students have chanted for free public education “from Greece to France”. In Serbia, nearly two years of student-led protest has helped bring a change of leadership at the ballot box.
This weekend the wave reached Germany, where a movement calling itself ‘Gen Z regelt’ – roughly, ‘Gen Z’s got this’ – called rallies in more than 30 cities for better schools, affordable lives, climate protection, and against a return of compulsory military service.
I can see it spreading. And I think we should all pay attention.
It would be easy to dismiss this as youthful anger, or to reduce it to the images of looting that have accompanied some marches. That would be a mistake. Listen to what the young people are actually saying. A 21-year-old in Rome speaks of single rooms in student housing costing 1,200 euros a month. In Lisbon, students are marching against plans to unfreeze tuition fees that have been capped since 2020. Across the continent, the demands overlap: crumbling schools, unaffordable housing, insecure jobs, the rising cost of fuel and food, a climate crisis they did not cause, and a deep feeling that nobody in power is listening.
Add to this a new anxiety that my generation never faced: artificial intelligence quietly eating away at the entry-level jobs that once gave young graduates their first step on the ladder. It is no wonder that many feel the future has been mortgaged before they have had a chance to live it.
This is a generation that was told to study hard, and it did. It was told education was the path to security. Now it finds the classrooms falling apart, the degrees expensive, the rents impossible, and the promised security nowhere in sight.
What strikes me most is that Europe is not alone. Over the past two years we have seen young people rise in Kenya, in Nepal, in Madagascar – our close neighbour in the Indian Ocean – and elsewhere. The tools are the same – TikTok, encrypted chats, leaderless networks that mobilise in hours – and so is the question: what kind of future are we being offered, and who decided it on our behalf?
In public life, I learnt that protest is rarely the first choice. It is usually the last, after letters go unanswered and promises are forgotten. When young people take to the streets in such numbers, the ordinary channels of listening have broken down.
In France, President Macron has announced education reforms – a first step, though the young will judge it by results. But reacting to each wave with concessions is not enough. Three things seem to me essential.
First, invest in education as infrastructure, not as an expense to be trimmed in hard times. Cutting school and university budgets simply transfers the debt to the next generation in another form.
Second, treat housing and the cost of living as questions of fairness between generations. When young adults cannot afford a home or a family, a society is eroding its own foundations.
Third, bring young people into the room as genuine partners, not as a photo opportunity. Serious consultation would do more to prevent the next wave of unrest than any number of riot police.
And to the young protesters themselves, I would say this, with respect and admiration: your cause is strongest when it is peaceful. The broken shop windows give your opponents the excuse they need to ignore you. The quiet determination of a tent camp, or a school occupation, or a peaceful march of thousands, is far harder to dismiss.
Watching from the Indian Ocean, I am grateful that Seychelles has so far been spared such unrest. That is no accident. Since the late 1970s we have steadily implemented progressive programmes of social justice: free health care for all, free education up to university (in 2009 I had the privilege of establishing the University of Seychelles), affordable housing, social security and pensions, sustained by progressive economic reforms. We feel the world’s shocks too, from fuel prices to the cost of living. But these choices have given our young people a real stake in their country, and, so far, no reason to take to the streets. That is not a cause for complacency, but for vigilance.
Every generation inherits a world shaped by the one before. What is different now is the speed at which this generation can organise, and the clarity with which it can see that the deal it has been offered is not a fair one.
Europe’s Gen Z is not asking for the impossible. It is asking for decent schools, affordable homes, a liveable planet and a voice. These are not radical demands. They are the basic promises any society makes to its children.
The question is whether those in power will treat this autumn as a security problem to be managed, or as a message to be answered. I hope, for Europe’s sake and for ours, they choose the second.
James Alix Michel is former president of the Republic of Seychelles.
IPS
