It’s a protest movement that a broke, lame-duck French government did not see coming. Civil servants this Tuesday joining high schoolers now in their third week of picketing over long-deteriorating classroom conditions. The usual recipe for wearing down movements in France has recently been to match eventual violence with a heavy hand, the escalation turning the silent majority against the protesters as was the case with the pre-Covid Yellow Vests movement.
And violence there has been. In spades. But these are teenagers, not adult, with many pressing legitimate gripes about growing inequality in education but some organizing on Snap and other socials are clearly cynical about their own future prospects and ready to have it out. With France in full pre-election posturing mode ahead of polls in the Spring, some see pigs where others see hoodlums with the government borrowing the far-right’s language and the far-left focusing on police brutality. What Emmanuel Macron’s team doesn’t have this time around is what’s being called magic money, the funds that French governments usually pull out of a hat to make a crisis go away. With France’s highest public debt rate in a quarter century spooking the euro zone and beyond, no magic money will this time appear to hire more teachers or build more classrooms. So what’s the answer?
Produced by François Picard, Rebecca Gnignati, Lucy Davalou, Juliette Laffont, Ilayda Habip and Charles Wente.
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