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I’ve written for UnHerd about the youth revolt engulfing Europe, and why it matters.
The triggers may differ — schools in France and Belgium, housing in Spain and Portugal, the cost of living in Italy, corruption and a mixture of the above in Serbia — but the root is the same. These are the protests of a generation that believes it has been robbed of its future. It’s a conclusion that’s hard to argue with. The social contract its parents knew — work hard and you will, at the very least, secure a home, be able to support a family and be better off than those that came before you — has collapsed. For many young Europeans without inherited wealth, adulthood means drifting from one precarious job to the next, earning barely enough to cover the cost of rent and groceries, let alone start a family. That is, if they find work at all. Meanwhile, they have watched the institutions that were supposed to give them a start in life and cushion its blows — schools, universities, health and youth services — wither under austerity and privatisation.
There is no doubt that young people have overwhelmingly borne the brunt of the neoliberal policies pursued over the past decades. That these has driven inequality to new heights is widely acknowledged; what is less often noticed is that this inequality is increasingly drawn along generational lines.
Blaming the boomers, however, would be a mistake. They simply had the good fortune to grow up in an era of full employment, affordable housing and decent pensions, and there is nothing scandalous about ageing societies spending more on the old. Moreover, much of that wealth is concentrated in the hands of a small minority of boomers; not all older people live a luxurious life, of course. Ultimately, the problem is not that pensions are too high; it is that the young are being denied what their parents took for granted. The generational divide is simply how a decades-long class war from above is experienced by those who came of age after workers had already lost it, and who inherited a political-economic regime built to transfer wealth upwards. In Europe, that regime has been written into the institutional architecture itself — the euro, the Maastricht treaty, the fiscal rules — which systematically favours asset holders over wage earners, and established workers over new entrants.
The mechanisms are well understood. A decade of quantitative easing inflated the property and financial assets held by the old while wages stagnated, locking the young out of home ownership. Labour market reforms — from Italy’s Treu package and Jobs Act to Germany’s Hartz laws and France’s El Khomri law — preserved the security of those already inside while consigning newcomers to a revolving door of temporary and increasingly precarious contracts in the name of “flexibility”. After 2010, austerity fell disproportionately on education, youth services and public investment. Existing pensions were largely shielded, while future ones were quietly cut. As a result, across Europe, government spending on older people has risen, while public investment has been gutted. Then came the pandemic, which cost Gen Z years of schooling, work and social life, followed by a surge in inflation, made worse by an energy shock that Europe’s leaders largely inflicted on themselves.
As if that weren’t enough, the young are now being told to accept further cuts and deteriorating living conditions to make room for rearmament and an open-ended war — for which, it seems, there is always money.
The real question, then, is not why the young are revolting, but why it took them so long.
One, of course, needs to distinguish between the peaceful protests demanding economic reform and the rioting and looting that accompanied them. But are they really two entirely separate stories? There is no question that much of the looting, in France as in Italy, had a strong second-generation component drawn from the banlieues and the marginalised peripheries of Italian cities, with little discernible ideology behind it. Nor is there any point denying the costs of mass immigration, from public safety to the pressure on public services. Many of those involved in the violence were clearly acting out of opportunism. And the growth of separate communities of different social and religious backgrounds, often living in conditions of extreme exclusion, is clearly a social time bomb, one that has already done serious damage to social cohesion — and those on the left who deny this reality are as blinkered as those on the right who fixate on it at the exclusion of everything else.
One might go further and argue that mass immigration has itself been part of the neoliberal social engineering of recent decades, not least by creating a reservoir of cheap labour. One might also argue that rioters running amok at peaceful demonstrations damage the protesters’ own cause, drowning out their demands and handing the security forces a pretext for a crackdown. There have even been claims that the French police deliberately allowed the destruction to happen in order to justify mass repression.
These are all valid arguments. But they raise an obvious question: why do the protesters raging against the status quo not turn their anger on these immigrants and instead often march alongside them? Are they simply blinded by naïve left-wing ideology? Or is something deeper at work? It is more likely that they experience their struggle primarily through a generational lens, one that cuts across ethnic, and to a certain degree class, lines.
Read the article here. If you’re a paid subscriber and you can’t access the article write to me at thomasfazi82@gmail.com. You may also help me spread my post about it on X.
Thanks for reading. Putting out high-quality journalism requires constant research, most of which goes unpaid, so if you appreciate my writing please consider upgrading to a paid subscription if you haven’t already. Aside from a fuzzy feeling inside of you, you’ll get access to exclusive articles and commentary. Alternatively, you could buy me a coffee!
Thomas Fazi
Website: thomasfazi.net
Twitter: @battleforeurope
Latest book: The Brussels Empire: The EU’s Silent Coup Against Democracy (German version only for now: Die Brüsseler Tyrannei: oder Der diskrete Staatsstreich)
Actually Thomas, you missed the barn, by a mile. You never even bring up the third world unintegrated predominantly Islamic immigration literally imposed on European citizens by so called enlightened leaders. You don’t bring up the energy, tax and regulatory regimes imposed that have literally left Europe 30%+ behind America on a per capita GDP basis. As for France it spends 57% of GDP on government and is teetering towards insolvency. You blame it on the bromide of inequality when the leadership in Europe makes it almost impossible to get ahead and makes it a crime if one complains. In short, you miss the barn, by a mile.
Not the case for Western Europe, but the Serbian Student List is good old NED/CIA sponsored regime change.