What Does Europe's Youth Want?

What Does Europe's Youth Want?

From the Lycées of Paris to Berlin's School Strikes, from Belgrade to Madrid: A Generation's List of Demands, and Its Class

Dear Young Comrades,

Today, on 2 October 2026, about 400 lycées in France are closed. A week ago, in more than a hundred German cities, lycée students walked out against conscription. In Belgrade, university students are entering the 25 October election with a list of their own. In Madrid, after an 87-year-old woman was carried out of her home on a stretcher, tents went up in Puerta del Sol.

The news reports these as separate events: "violence" in France, "pacifism" in Germany, "corruption" in Serbia, "rent" in Spain. In this piece we will ask a single question: what does Europe's youth want? First a short summary, then the detail.

In brief

• France: Blockades that began in the last week of September at a lycée in Créteil spread nationwide within ten days. Today about 400 lycées are closed, there is action or disruption at 560 schools, and about 2,000 people are in custody, most of them children. The demands are thoroughly ordinary: no class of 35, enough teachers and enough chairs, schools that do not turn into ovens in the summer heat. The same week, the government announced the 2027 budget, which freezes the civil-service pay index and cuts public spending.
• Germany: Since December 2025 there have been four waves of school strikes against the military-service law that came into force in January 2026. The latest wave came on 25–26 September, set off when 18-year-olds who had said they were not interested in military service were summoned to a medical examination. Their slogan: "Merz's children and von der Leyen's will not go to the front. We will."
• Serbia, Bulgaria, Spain, Italy: In Serbia, students turned a two-year movement into an electoral list. In Bulgaria, protests led by Gen Z brought down the government in December 2025. In Spain it is housing, in Italy strikes against the war on Gaza and against rearmament, that bring the young into the street.
• The figures: According to a 2026 study of 8,024 young people aged 16–26 in seven countries, half of them think their own generation will live worse than their parents. Only half count democracy as the best form of government. Trust in political parties is 12 percent.
• Our answer: Europe's youth is not chasing the abstraction of "more freedom." It wants school, a home, work, health and peace, that is, the conditions for the reproduction of wage labour. Capital is scything those conditions for the sake of budget cuts, rent and rearmament. The young are rebelling against exactly that. The list of demands looks reformist, but the obstacle in front of it is the system itself.

Now to the detail.

France: The class without enough chairs

How did it start?

The blockades began in the last week of September in Val-de-Marne, at the Saint-Exupéry Lycée in Créteil. By Friday 25 September, dozens of lycées in Seine-Saint-Denis and Val-de-Marne had lined rubbish bins up at their gates. The Créteil education authority recorded "about ten" new blockades that day alone, and the Paris police announced 31 detentions by evening (Bourse Direct/AFP).

What the lycée students say looks less like a programme than a list of complaints, and the class content is exactly there. A 17-year-old student lists the troubles like this: overcrowded classes, heat, the pressure of Parcoursup (the university-placement system), student–teacher incidents that go unpunished. Another says "things have been getting worse for three years." The words of a student who spoke to Al Jazeera today are the plainest form: "There are 35 of us in the class, there are not enough chairs for everyone, the lunch break is one hour" (Al Jazeera, 2 October).

The lycée students' organisation, the Union syndicale lycéenne (USL), called on 29 September for blockades nationwide. The demands: close the shortage of teachers and staff, hire substitute teachers, reduce class sizes, repair the buildings and air-condition them, raise the education budget (LCP; Al Jazeera, 30 September). The June heatwave had already laid bare, in front of everyone, the state the school buildings are in.

Lycée students and civil servants in the street on the same day

29 September was not a coincidence. The same day, eight civil-service confederations (CGT, FO, CFDT, UNSA, FSU, Solidaires, CFE-CGC, FA-FP) struck at 170 places. The reason was Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu's freeze, in the 2027 budget, of the civil-service pay index (point d'indice). By the unions' reckoning, accumulated inflation since 2017 is above 24 percent; the index was raised by 3.5 percent in 2022 and 1.5 percent in 2023, and that is all. Participation in the strike among teachers was expected to be 40 percent. The same day, firefighters who had fought unprecedented forest fires over the summer marched as well (Public Sénat, 29 September).

So the same budget line ties the lycée student who complains of an overcrowded class to the teacher whose wage is melting. According to Al Jazeera, the austerity package is 54 billion euros. The rise in the education budget stays below inflation. The lycée student and the teacher live the same cut from two corners of the classroom.

Violence, and the "who is behind it?" reflex

Within ten days, in some places, the blockades turned into urban clashes. Today's balance sheet: about 400 lycées closed, action or disruption at 560 schools, about 2,000 detentions, most of them children, more than 170 injured students, 65 injured school staff of whom 40 are headteachers, and more than 100 lycées heavily damaged (Al Jazeera, 2 October). Fires broke out at lycées in Nantes, Marseille and Le Havre, and cars were burned in Strasbourg (The National). Hydrochloric acid thrown at the police was also reported. The actions spread to the Belgian city of Liège.

Let us say this plainly: burning a school, injuring a headteacher, throwing acid at the police does not serve the movement's demands. A young person who wants a school, and burns that school, hands the movement to its enemy. On the other hand, let us also look at the consistency of those who rule:

• Education Minister Édouard Geffray first accused MPs from La France Insoumise (LFI) of "instrumentalising the youth," then said the movement was "hostage to the ultra-left," and proposed distance learning for the closed schools.
• Justice Minister Gérald Darmanin proposed that families pay the bill for the damage.
• Marine Le Pen said what was happening was "not a lycée action but a revolt organised by professionals," and called for a new riot law.
• The intelligence services told the government's crisis meeting that LFI had started the movement. LFI denied it. Louis Boyard said "LFI has always defended non-violent demonstration." Jean-Luc Mélenchon called on MPs and members to place themselves between the police and the lycée students.
• Amnesty International condemned the police over footage showing law enforcement attacking lycée students.

There is a pattern here. The state answers the child who says there is no chair in the classroom first with batons, then with the question "who is behind them?" Yet behind them is a class of 35, a melting wage, and a cut of 54 billion euros. The minister who proposes billing the families does not say whom he will bill for the budget that brought the schools to this state.

France has a presidential election in April 2027. The lycée students' revolt is the voice of a generation squeezed between the centre right's politics of cuts and Le Pen's politics of "order." For the left, the real question is this: will this anger become an organised education movement, or will it scatter and fade with burning rubbish bins?

Germany: "The Rich Want War, Students Want a Future"

We told this movement in detail a week ago (The Rich Want War, Students Want a Future). Here let us only complete the part of the picture that belongs to Europe.

What does the law say?

The military-service law that came into force in January 2026 rests, for now, on a voluntary basis. But every man turning 18 must undergo a medical examination. If the security situation worsens, or if the number of volunteers is not enough, the government can switch to conscription. Chancellor Friedrich Merz's aim is to make the Bundeswehr Europe's strongest conventional army: to raise the number of soldiers from about 186,700 today to 260,000 in the early 2030s, and to add 200,000 reservists to that (The Nation).

Four waves

• 5 December 2025: The first school strike, in about 90 cities (evangelisch.de).
• 5 March 2026: The second wave.
• 8 May 2026: On the Day of Liberation from Fascism, a march from the Brandenburg Gate to CDU headquarters. A 17-year-old organiser: "Merz's children, von der Leyen's, or Papperger's, will not go to the front. We will" (evangelisch.de). It is no coincidence that Armin Papperger, the boss of Rheinmetall, is on this list: the lycée students also know the profit column of the war.
• 25–26 September 2026: More than 100 demonstrations, from Kiel to Hamburg, from Berlin to Frankfurt. The trigger: in Kiel and Flensburg, 18-year-olds who had stated on the registration form that they were not interested in military service were summoned to examination. The Defence Ministry confirmed that since July about 1,000 such young people had been put through the examination.

The list of demands

The programme of the "School Strikes Against Conscription" initiative is this: no conscription and no compulsory alternative service; military spending shifted to education, social services and the environment; the Bundeswehr out of the schools; counselling on military service for every graduating class; recognition of students' right to strike; disarmament discussed in place of armament.

Set beside France, one likeness is immediately plain: the lycée student in Paris says "there is no chair," the lycée student in Berlin says "tank money for the school." Both object to the same budget choice. Meanwhile the first reflex of the state and the media in Germany was the same as in France: Hessian radio wrote that "behind" the strikes stood the German Communist Party (DKP) and its youth organisation, the SDAJ. When the young voice a demand, what comes first to the rulers' minds is the question of who "whispered" that demand, not the demand itself.

The other corners of Europe

Serbia: From movement to list

On 1 November 2024 the concrete canopy of Novi Sad railway station collapsed, and 16 people were killed. Students saw this as the result of corruption and careless repair, and they have been in the street for two years. They occupied faculties, they held the largest demonstrations in the country's history, they forced a prime minister to resign. On 14 September 2026 they submitted an electoral list called "Students Are Winning" and marched in Belgrade. Vučić dissolved parliament and called an early election for 25 October. He announced that he would step down from the presidency and stand for prime minister (Charter 97). Their demands are accountability, and an investigation of corruption in construction.

Bulgaria: The government that fell over a budget

On 26 November 2025 the government proposed raising pension and social-security contributions in the 2026 budget. The streets filled: 50,000 to 150,000 on 1 December, 100,000 to 250,000 on 10 December. University students in Sofia organised through TikTok, and the international press called the actions "Gen Z protests." Prime Minister Rosen Zhelyazkov resigned on 11 December (Wikipedia: 2025–2026 Bulgarian protests). That the spark was a budget line, that the young objected to the bill of a pension system they have not yet entered, is an important detail.

Spain: The class of the home

On 23 September, 87-year-old Maricarmen Abascal was carried on a stretcher out of the Madrid home she had lived in for more than 70 years. An investment fund had bought the flat. On Saturday about 30,000 people marched with placards reading "Housing is for living" and "Speculators, back to your own homes." The tents set up in Puerta del Sol grew by the day. A student's words: "Politicians do not merely do nothing, they make it worse. We have planted our feet now." Spain has a shortage of 750,000 homes, and rents have doubled in ten years. Prime Minister Sánchez promised an emergency tenants' decree (The Star/Reuters). We told this story in detail a week ago (Maricarmen's Stretcher, Elif's Key).

Italy: "Let us stop everything"

The general strikes against the war on Gaza and against rearmament, led by the rank-and-file union USB, have gone on since September 2025 together with student collectives. The watchword of the 18 May 2026 strike was "Let us stop everything." The strikers' account draws, directly, the link we made above: military spending is cut from wages, from health, from school and from pensions (Peoples Dispatch).

And the others

The students' "Chalk Revolution" in Slovakia, student actions in Czechia against cuts to public broadcasting, a mobilisation in Georgia past 500 days, those in Greece demanding an accounting for the Tempi train crash (European Democracy Hub). Outside Europe the picture is similar: Nepal, Morocco, Indonesia, Madagascar, Kenya, Peru. These are the subject of a piece of their own.

What do the figures say?

Let us complete the street photograph with data. For the TUI Foundation's "Young Europe 2026" study, YouGov interviewed 8,024 young people aged 16–26 in Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Greece, Poland and Britain in April–May 2026 (TUI Stiftung, Young Europe 2026):

• Generational decline: 52 percent of the young think their own generation will live worse than their parents; only 25 percent think it will live better. Those optimistic about their own future were 70 percent in 2017; today they are 57 percent.
• Priorities have become material: In 2022, when people said freedom, freedom of expression and elections came first. Today, equality of opportunity and protection from illness and poverty come first. The most important political fields are the economy (34 percent), health (31 percent) and social policy (29 percent).
• A conditional attachment to democracy: Those who count democracy as the best form of government were 63 percent in 2022; today they are 50 percent. Only 26 percent are satisfied with how democracy works in their country (Newswav/dpa). Those who say "people like me have no influence on government" are 45 percent.
• The map of trust: Trust in scientists is 67 percent, in the police 54 percent, in EU institutions 38 percent, in national governments 26 percent, in political parties 12 percent.

On housing the picture is harsher still. In the EU, 27 percent of young people aged 15–29 live in overcrowded housing; among those at risk of poverty the rate is 42 percent. More than one in ten young people aged 20–29 spend more than 40 percent of their income on housing (European Youth Portal).

One political scientist among the study's commentators says this: the young are not in principle against democracy, but they have lost their trust, and they judge democracy by its results. Let us say it a little more sharply: the young person who judges democracy by its results is, in a way, rediscovering in their own life the distinction Marx drew between formal equality and real equality. There is a right to vote, but no chair. There is an election, but no home.

What do they want? A class reading

When we set all these scenes side by side, the list of demands that emerges is surprisingly short:

• School: A class that is not overcrowded, enough teachers, a building that does not bake in the heat, a placement system that is not a lottery at the university gate.
• A home: A rent that does not swallow half an income, a dwelling that belongs to the person who lives in it, not to a fund.
• Work and a future: A life in which one will not live worse than one's parents.
• Peace: Not to be sent to the front, and the tank's money going to the school.
• To be able to demand an accounting: For the canopy that collapsed, the budget that sank, the home that was sold.

None of these is a utopia. All of them are the asking again for rights won in postwar Europe by the struggle of the working class, and in the shadow of the "fear of the Soviets." We told the history of how those rights were won in detail in our dossier A History of the European Working Class: no right was given, every one was taken. What is being taken back today is those same rights.

Looked at in a Marxist way, youth is not a class. It is a slice of age. But this slice is the one that carries the burden of capitalism's crisis in its most naked form. The young person who has not yet entered the labour market, or who waits at its gate, is the freshest contingent of capital's "reserve army of labour." School is where that labour power is produced. The home is where labour power is reproduced every day. Military service is the driving of that same labour power to the front in the name of the state. The lycée student in Paris, the striker in Berlin and the tenant in Madrid object to different links of the same chain: the conditions of the production and reproduction of labour power are being cut in order to protect the rate of profit.

That is why, even if the demands look reformist, the obstacle in front of them is structural. The same budget carries both the cut of 54 billion euros and the rearmament targets. The same market both sells Maricarmen's home to a fund and swallows the young tenant's income. The demand is "more chairs," but the hand that takes the chair away is the hand of a property relation.

The rulers' account, and youth's demand

The rulers' account	Youth's demand, and its class meaning
"Lycée students are being instrumentalised by a party."	The class has 35 students, and there are not enough chairs. Behind them is not a party, but a budget.
"Let the families pay the bill for the violence."	The bill for the cuts that wore the schools down has already been sent to the families: the pay index was frozen.
"Military service is a sacrifice required for the defence of the country."	The one who will make the sacrifice is not Merz's child, or Papperger's, but the worker's child.
"The housing crisis is a shortage of supply; what is needed is more construction."	The home has been turned into an investment vehicle. The problem is not quantity, but property.
"The young are drifting from democracy and falling for populism."	The young see that a democracy which gives them neither a home nor a school has remained formal.
"Gen Z organises on TikTok; it will not last."	In Bulgaria it brought down a government. In Serbia it put a list on the ballot.

Two paths: the right, or the left?

The same anger can flow in two directions. The TUI data show that migration has climbed toward the top of the young's EU agenda, and that among those ready to defend their country with arms there is a large gap between men and women (45 percent of men, 23 percent of women). The AfD's 43.8 percent in Saxony-Anhalt (AfD's 43.8 Percent Is Not a Deviation) and about half of 16-to-24-year-olds in Berlin voting for the Left Party (Elif Eralp: "We Wrote History, Comrades") happened in the same country, in the same month. So the outcome is not settled in advance. What decides it is whether the anger is organised in the language of class, or in the language of "the foreigner," "the migrant," "order."

In June, in Gen-Z Socialism: Capitalism’s New Nightmare, we discussed the anxiety The Economist put on its cover. The picture in the street today shows that the anxiety was not for nothing. But an anxiety is not yet a programme. This is also the weak point of the youth movements: all of them are intense, fast and horizontal. Few of them have the durability of a union, a party, a neighbourhood assembly. Burning rubbish bins in France, the school administration's threat of fines in Germany, the "list or movement?" argument in Serbia are different forms of the same question: the question of organisation.

Seen from Turkey

This picture is not foreign to us. We told of overcrowded classes, the teacher shortage and the physical state of the schools in The Bell Does Not Ring the Same for Everyone. The young person who gives half their income to rent, the university student who cannot leave the family home, the graduate who cannot find work or who works as a courier: this is the everyday reality of this country. The difference is here. In Europe a lycée student can line rubbish bins up at the school gate and say "I want a chair," and the state's response becomes an international story. Here, the same demand is met at a much heavier cost. Reading the list of Europe's youth, one also has to think of that list's counterpart here, and of the conditions under which these demands can be spoken here.

Concrete tasks for young comrades

• Make the demand concrete: "We want a future" is a fine slogan, but in a school it is a stronger demand to say "this class needs this many teachers, this many desks." The strength of the French lycée students is in how ordinary their demands are.
• Read the budget: School, home and military service are lines of the same budget. Say every demand together with its counterpart in the budget: show which line was cut, and which line the money was moved to.
• Stand side by side with the teacher, the civil servant, the tenant: It is no coincidence that in Paris the lycée students and the civil servants marched on the same day. A youth movement becomes lasting when it meets the labour movement.
• Reject violence, but do not make the state's violence invisible: Burning a school harms the movement. But the violence of a state that takes 2,000 children into custody must be named with the same clarity.
• Have your answer ready for "who is behind you?": Behind us are overcrowded classes, high rents, and our peers being called to the front.
• Organise: In school representative bodies, in student collectives, in tenants' unions, in youth organisations. TikTok can start an action. To carry it on, an organisation is needed.
• Look internationally: You are asking the same questions as the young of Paris, Berlin, Belgrade and Madrid. Follow their experience, and share your own.

---

Dear Comrades,

What does Europe's youth want? The short answer: a chair to sit on, a home to live in, and a future in which one will not be sent to the front. Is that too much? No. These are the plainest conditions of a human life. But to protect these conditions one has to give up profit, rent and the arms budget. Capital has no intention of giving them up.

That is why a plain list of demands is perceived by the rulers as a "revolt." Look at the French minister's question, "who is behind them?", at the German lycée student's answer, "Merz's children will not go to the front," and at the Madrid student's words, "we have planted our feet now," and one thing becomes clear: this generation has learned that the future promised to it is no longer going to come. The question now is whether it will learn to build that future with its own hands, and together.

Dear young comrades, we are the ones who ask for the chair, and we are the ones who make it. The future will not be given to us. We will build it.

---

Update

2 October 2026, 19:52 (Istanbul): The day's balance sheet in France is about 400 lycées closed, action or disruption at 560 schools, and about 2,000 detentions. Education Minister Geffray is expected to meet the unions. In Serbia, 23 days remain until the 25 October election. A date for the next wave of school strikes in Germany has not yet been announced. We will update this piece regularly as things develop.

---

Sources

France

• Al Jazeera — Protests shutter hundreds of French schools as violence flares (2 October 2026)
• Al Jazeera — What's behind French student protests that turned violent? (30 September 2026)
• The National — Hundreds of French schools close after youth protests turn violent (2 October 2026)
• Public Sénat — Grèves et mobilisation sociale: fonctionnaires, pompiers, blocage des lycées (29 September 2026)
• LCP — Blocus de lycées: Mélenchon demande aux insoumis de s'interposer (28 September 2026)
• Bourse Direct/AFP — Blocus de lycées franciliens: la mobilisation s'amplifie (25 September 2026)

Germany

• The Nation — Students strike across Germany in protest against military service (26 September 2026)
• evangelisch.de — Warum Jugendliche jetzt die Schule bestreiken (5 March 2026)
• evangelisch.de — An den Schulen wird wieder gestreikt (7 May 2026)

Other countries

• Charter 97 — Serbia's student list and the Belgrade march (15 September 2026)
• Wikipedia — 2025–2026 Bulgarian protests
• The Star — Madrid housing protests enter third day after pensioner's eviction (28 September 2026)
• Peoples Dispatch — Italy on strike again for Palestine (19 May 2026)
• European Democracy Hub — The 2025 Surge in Global Protests Is Continuing in 2026

Data

• TUI Stiftung — Young Europe 2026 (English report)
• TUI Stiftung — Jugendstudie 2026 Gesamtbericht
• Newswav/dpa — Young Europeans more wary of democracy, see fewer prospects
• European Youth Portal — Housing affordability for young people in Europe

Related pieces at Knowledge Commons

• The Rich Want War, Students Want a Future (26 September 2026)
• Maricarmen's Stretcher, Elif's Key: Europe's Housing Crisis and the Class of the Home (25 September 2026)
• Dossier: A History of the European Working Class Is Out (27 September 2026)
• Gen-Z Socialism: Capitalism’s New Nightmare (9 June 2026)
• AfD's 43.8 Percent Is Not a Deviation (11 September 2026)
• Elif Eralp: "We Wrote History, Comrades" (20 September 2026)
• The Bell Does Not Ring the Same for Everyone

This piece is published under a CC BY-SA 4.0 licence. You may share, reproduce and develop it, provided you give credit.