Europe Is Aflame, and It’s Not Going to Stop

 

Opinion

Guest Essay

Europe Is Aflame, and It’s Not Going to Stop

Oct. 29, 2026

Credit...Cristina Daura

By Anton Jäger

Mr. Jäger is a contributing Opinion writer and the author of “Hyperpolitics.” He wrote from Brussels.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/29/opinion/europe-protests-youth-france.html

 

A decade and a half ago, Time magazine chose “The Protester” as its person of the year. From California to Cairo, the weekly profiled more than 100 participants in public demonstrations throughout 2011: One was pictured wearing a black-and-orange gas mask, while from another, who spoke Arabic, the magazine “understood the words Facebook and Twitter.” Together they made up the aggregate that became the year’s hero.

Today, Time’s choice appears both timely and distant. As a fresh wave of protest roils the West, little of the magazine’s romanticism about public rebellion survives. Despair rather than celebration now is the dominant mood in which Western commentators approach the protests, as younger citizens take to the streets across Europe.

Although geographically spread out, the current surges display a remarkable synchronicity. In France, student protests have given way to more violent insurrections, while young people have occupied squares in Madrid and Lisbon. In Albania, the country’s Supreme Court was set aflame by antigovernment protesters, while in Italian cities the police geared up for clashes with demonstrators.

In contrast to the indignant citizens portrayed by Time in 2011, today’s protesters resist easy political identification. On the left, organizers have distanced themselves from those who hijacked their protest marches with indiscriminate looting. On the right, commentators have cast protesters as extremists or youngsters with migrant backgrounds supposedly bent on toppling the West one luxury outlet at a time.

These interpretations strain credulity. Instead, the protests appear as a wholly contemporary genre of unofficial politics, typical of our hyperpolitical age. Resistant to political recuperation by either left or right, they express feelings of generational futility. The protests have put Europe on edge. Yet given the circumstances underlying them, they appear destined to recur.

Some months after Time nominated its person of the year, the German sociologist Wolfgang Streeck delivered a lecture in Frankfurt on what he termed “the delayed crisis of democratic capitalism.” In the talk, he described a malaise of Europe’s fiscal state that had been building since the end of the 20th century. Against a backdrop of declining growth rates, Mr. Streeck argued, governments were caught between the barricade and the bond market, with no effective remedy in sight.

Mr. Streeck’s diagnosis has lost little of its pertinence in 2026. If anything, the crisis he detected appears only to have deepened. After freer monetary policy in the 2010s, interest rates are again rising across the West, pushing up borrowing costs for governments. Europeans hungry for increased public spending and better services are likely to be disappointed. Austerity, never fully terminated, is instead set to return in full force.

In fact, additional stresses have now been added to Mr. Streeck’s stack. In 2011, European states were not yet under pressure to raise money for rearmament, and hostilities in Ukraine were three years away. The Israeli-American war on Iran, with all its inflationary effects, appeared a grim speculation. Climate crises and Chinese competition seemed more inchoate than immediate. What the historian Adam Tooze has called the “polycrisis” — or the set of overlapping crises that stalk European polities today — was not fully installed.

The repertoire of protest has shifted, too. In 2011, enthusiasts for new social media platforms were quick to call the revolts in Europe and North Africa “Facebook revolutions,” seeing them as predominantly digital uprisings. The label seemed cheap at the time, more a marketing ploy on behalf of tech companies eager to advertise their democratic credentials than a faithful description. Most of all, it obscured that unions and neighborhood networks had played as important a role in gathering people as the platforms.

 

The label appears less cheap today. Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s leftist party, France Unbowed, was able to mobilize tens of thousands of students and teachers to shut down the nation’s high school system. Yet much of the protest activity was launched outside of the left’s official circuits — instigated through TikTok or chat apps. The same is true in Brussels, where union officials have had difficulty keeping up with online calls to assemble. Crucially, the current generation of protesters are natives, not novices, to these platforms, having grown up in the social internet.

As a result, many of the protesters operate outside the purview of traditional organizations such as unions and parties. This undoubtedly grants the demonstrations their liveliness and scale, yet it also lends itself to a lack of discipline. To outsiders, participants and nonparticipants are more difficult to parse, befitting more thoroughly decentralized movements. Even more formal groups like the Yellow Vests in France, who joined in protests last weekend, are prey to operational looseness.

The move to rioting and looting, what’s more, suggests aims that have less to do with social rights or public provision. To analysts such as Ivan Krastev, the background for these uprisings is a wider sense of futurelessness, also palpable in continental anxieties about migration and demographic decline. In this dire setting, riots express a zero-sum mentality in which participants feel that the building of durable collective power is improbable and direct action is more promising.

Such hopelessness is deepened by a labor market in which degrees seem meaningless, as artificial intelligence is set to dissever the structure of Europe’s working lives. Whereas the mass mobilizations of the 20th century took place in a hopeful future conditional, the time horizon of contemporary protest has shrunk to more immediate aims: increased funding, the seizure of goods. “Tout comprendre, c’est tout pardonner,” as the French say. Yet a certain youthful nihilism, in the face of such somber prospects, is hard to qualify as irrational.

Political prediction always exudes a whiff of astrology. Even if a Serbia-style scenario is hard to envision, Europe’s current upheavals will undoubtedly have short-term effects, perhaps jerking French public opinion to the right or swaying Spanish voters to the left. Yet whatever the protests’ consequences on the level of formal politics, their root conditions — fiscal retrenchment, digital entropy, grief over a future annulled — are unlikely to recede. It is hard to believe the protesters will either.

 

Anton Jäger is a contributing Opinion writer. He is a researcher at KU Leuven in Belgium and the author of “Hyperpolitics: Extreme Politicization Without Political Consequences.”

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