Editor's note: Hu Zichen is a PhD researcher in Media and Communications Department, London School of Economics and Political Science, a research associate at Centre for Dialogue and Global Affairs (formerly known as the Oxford Global Society), and a scientist at the International Panel on the Information Environment (IPIE). Her research examines disinformation governance and techno-geopolitical securitization in the UK, US and EU. The article reflects the author's opinions and not necessarily the views of CGTN.

From classrooms and housing markets to energy bills and public budgets, Europe's protests expose a crisis of reform – and a contest over who can turn discontent into democratic power.

Europe has entered a tumultuous autumn. Paris has witnessed trade unionists and students taking to the streets over teacher shortages, rising living costs and deteriorating public services. In Albania's capital, Tirana, tens of thousands of students have protested education costs, bleak employment prospects and alleged government corruption; some demonstrations descended into arson and clashes with police. In Rome, organized labour has demanded better wages, secure work and a different allocation of public resources. In Spain and Portugal, housing affordability and household purchasing power have sparked outcries of public anger.  

The largest rallies have been peaceful, but violence, looting and confrontations with police have accompanied several gatherings. On October 24, a new nationwide day of protest in France drew approximately 410,000 people according to the Interior Ministry, while the General Confederation of Labour (CGT) counted close to 800,000.  

And yet their grievances point towards a shared political question. When economic strain grows into collective anger, how effectively can existing institutions respond? And when policy concessions fail to restore confidence, which political actors gain the power to explain – and potentially capitalize on – that disappointment?

By November, the question was no longer simply one of government response. France had announced a broader education package on October 26, yet dissatisfied student organizations continued to mobilize. The more revealing question was whether concessions could become a settlement, and whether a settlement could deliver lasting improvements.

From education to housing: An anxious generation confronts inequality

The latest demonstrations have unmistakable socioeconomic roots. Education and housing in particular give way to a generational fear that the once-familiar route from study to employment to independence is becoming less secure. In France, the recent school movement began in late September in the Paris region, including disputes over unfilled teaching posts, before spreading to hundreds of secondary schools nationwide. Students objected to missing substitute teachers, overcrowded classes, inadequate premises, school timetables and the Parcoursup university admissions process.

These are not merely complaints about classroom management. Education is supposed to act as a ladder of social mobility, but when resources differ sharply among schools, admissions become more competitive and daily expenses rise, and students begin to wonder whether effort and credentials still offer a credible promise of stability. A demonstration outside a French school gate thus also becomes a protest against an increasingly uncertain future.

In Albania, younger protesters have linked material pressures more directly to governmental legitimacy. On October 14, tens of thousands marched in Tirana against higher education costs, poor university conditions, insufficient support and limited prospects after graduation. Some demonstrators accused senior officials of corruption and called for the resignation of Prime Minister Edi Rama. The demonstrations eventually escalated, with fires reported at the Education Ministry and bank buildings. Police deployed water cannons and tear gas. Violent clashes recurred on October 24.

Albania is not an EU member state, and its political economy should not be collapsed into that of the Euro area. However, its long-standing ambitions for European integration, combined with the frustration of a generation that sees higher education as essential but not necessarily rewarding, make it a revealing case from Europe's periphery.

Across Spain and even in Portugal, housing has become an equally powerful measure of frustrated expectations. Rent and property prices have risen beyond what many young workers can afford as they seek to establish independent lives, and a university degree and full-time employment no longer necessarily yield a stable home. Madrid's tenant demonstrations and protest camps have made that contradiction especially visible, whereas in Lisbon, low wages, housing costs and the wider cost of living have helped spark demonstrations.

All these countries, however, seem to raise the same question: Can education, employment and earnings still provide an ordinary person with a reasonably predictable and stable future?

How the energy shock magnifies social fault lines

Energy markets connect faraway conflicts to the most immediate costs of everyday life.

If strained housing markets, uneven education provision and overstretched public services are long-standing sources of discontent, geopolitical conflict has worked to intensify those pressures through energy markets and fiscal policy. After the Russia-Ukraine conflict began in 2022, European governments accelerated their efforts to reduce dependence on Russian gas: expanding liquefied natural gas (LNG) imports, building import infrastructure and pursuing supply diversification alongside renewable energy and grid investment.

The conflict that began with US and Israeli strikes on Iran on February 28, 2026 forced a further rupture. Shipments via the Strait of Hormuz were severely disrupted from early March, with the International Energy Agency (IEA) describing the strait's de facto closure as taking almost one-fifth of global LNG supply off the market, triggering extreme volatility in European and Asian gas prices. Even when European buyers did not directly purchase the displaced cargoes, competition for other available supplies meant the effects rippled through the global market.

Research published on July 10 by the European Commission's Joint Research Centre estimated that, under its modeled scenarios, the adverse effects of the Middle East energy shock could be up to 2.5 times more severe for the poorest households than for the wealthiest. Lower-income families typically devote a larger share of their budgets to necessities such as food, heating, electricity and transport, and have less room to absorb unexpected costs.

But the leap from a cost-of-living shock to a crisis of political confidence is far from inevitable. Governments can always cut energy taxes, subsidize bills, provide targeted transfers or compensate exposed businesses, but every action has consequences: broad subsidies are costly affairs, tax cuts reduce revenues and means-tested help can leave households just above eligibility thresholds, leaving them feeling unprotected despite facing substantial hardship.

A Reuters report dated October 1 drew on a European Commission note, putting the cost of energy-relief measures adopted by 25 EU member states in 2026 at €17.9 billion. More than two-thirds of that support took the form of relatively untargeted price interventions, prompting the Commission to argue for temporary measures focused more closely on vulnerable households and firms. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development's (OECD) tracker shows that governments have employed an array of temporary and targeted instruments, with significantly different policy designs.  

The argument over distribution takes place against competing budget priorities with continued support for Ukraine, defence-industrial capacity and European security ambitions demanding funding alongside hospitals, schools, housing and energy systems. Debt servicing, sluggish growth and the rules governing public finances further narrow available options, though the precise parameters of those constraints differ from country to country. For a voter who sees a deteriorating classroom or a rent bill they cannot pay, the question may be brutally plain: Why can the state mobilize resources for strategic priorities while struggling to improve basic services?

Politics distorts that question into competing explanations. Reuters reported on October 20 that fuel-price anger had become a mobilizing issue for far-right parties in several European countries; some figures connected domestic energy costs to sanctions on Russia, support for Ukraine or their governments' broader foreign-policy choices.

Winter poses further challenges. In October, EU gas stocks sank below historical averages, exposing the region to greater price risks in the event of a cold spell or renewed supply interruption. Even then, the European Commission's assessment of October 8 was not an emergency warning: it argued that diversified supplies, increased LNG capacity and a more flexible gas system should allow the EU to meet demand during the upcoming winter. In this sense, vulnerability should be assessed separately from forecasts of shortages. In spite of this, families plan heating expenditure, firms anticipate production costs and governments decide whether they can afford another season of support.

Students and organized labour: How a protest becomes a movement

Trade unions in particular have a keen interest in the complex relationship between energy costs, real wages, redundancies and public services. They can articulate demands for pay increases, stronger employment protections and more equitable public support. Most notably, the autumn protests challenge the assumption that Europe's recent turmoil is merely a sequence of spontaneous, vaguely intertwined youth disturbances.

In France, the CGT and other unions have provided channels through which students, wage-earners, pensioners and some veterans of the Yellow Vest movement might act together. The October 17 mobilization illustrates such a convergence and its limits. Anonymous TikTok posts promoting the revival of the Yellow Vests began circulation as early as September, originally without clear organizational backing, and as student demonstrations intensified, the date attracted wider attention. Le Monde, citing social-listening firm Visibrain, reported that nearly 460,000 social media messages related to October 17 were posted between September 27 and October 16. Meanwhile, TikTok videos mentioning the date had accumulated close to 132 million views.

And yet organized labour helped provide the diffuse call with a practical form. The CGT endorsed mobilization wherever conditions permitted, and its local organizations published specific meeting points and a Paris procession from Place de la République to Place de Clichy.  

Long-established union networks facilitate coordination among movements across workplaces and regions, prompting negotiations with employers and public authorities, and placing demands within formal policy discussions. Students seeking more teachers, workers demanding higher pay and pensioners concerned about the value of benefits may all be drawn into an argument about purchasing power, public budgets and the distribution of social protection.

Italy, in turn, offers another example. On October 17, the Italian General Confederation of Labour (CGIL), alongside civil-society associations, rallied in Rome regarding work, peace, social welfare and constitutional rights. CGIL reported that roughly 100,000 people attended and announced a general strike for November 20. The announcement signaled an attempt to grow a single demonstration into a sustained contest over the government's next budget.

Who gets to call it a riot? AI and the struggle to define protest

When governments cannot respond quickly or convincingly to public grievances, political actors compete to define the causes of the crisis. Parts of the European far right, like figures in US President Donald Trump's political orbit, frame housing shortages, pressure on schools, complicated failures of planning, fiscal allocation and public administration through the language of a zero-sum competition for scarce resources between "insiders/us" and "outsiders/them." The politics of grievance often depends on which of these explanations is most visible, rather than which is most comprehensive.

Interestingly, the grievances about affordability of life echo across the Atlantic. Demands for teachers, secure housing and public services in France can be read alongside an American municipal program that asks why ordinary life has become unaffordable and who benefits from that arrangement. As a response, Trump and Republican allies blamed France's unrest on immigrants, which tries to turn a dispute over education and living costs into supporting evidence for MAGA's account of migration and disorder.

Online platforms have also intensified the visibility and virality of this struggle. The French unrest around October 17 produced an extraordinary combination of genuine footage, misleadingly relabelled old videos, synthetic imagery and partisan commentary. Le Monde reported that false or misleading clips were circulated as evidence of scenes from the French protests, while real episodes of looting and police confrontation travelled widely beyond the cities where they occurred. Images were recut, contextualized or placed alongside fabricated material, making the character of the protests harder to establish from a social feed alone.  

One especially striking falsehood depicted a protester in a Pink Panther costume confronting police water cannons. Full Fact and other investigators established that the viral images and videos were AI-generated or manipulated, with source material derived from protests elsewhere. Earlier in September, Le Monde had documented AI-generated Yellow Vest posters circulating through newly created or renamed social accounts. Such visual content can manufacture the appearance of a coherent, nationwide mobilization before organizers, responsibilities and local arrangements have been established.

The resulting confusion was measurable. Le Monde reported that the French fact-checking service Vera received 9,500 questions between October 1 and 19; 49% of which concerned the authenticity of reported violence and incidents associated with the protests. The prominence of these questions does not show that half of all circulating information was false. It does show how deeply uncertainty about images had entered the public understanding of events.  

Concessions, negotiations and delivery: What has actually changed?

By November 3, the French government had responded to the protests by scrapping some planned student fees, hiring teachers and promising wider education reforms. On October 1, ministers withdrew proposed registration charges for students without scholarships in certain vocational and preparatory programs. The education ministry also reported hiring more than half of 920 planned contract teachers, while the number of secondary schools facing the worst shortages fell from 114 to 21. Longer-term commitments included canceling teacher cuts, proposing 500 additional posts and introducing a 28-pupil limit for first-year upper-secondary classes, beginning in the more disadvantaged half of schools in 2027 and extending nationwide in 2028. Ministers also proposed replacing Parcoursup, the higher-education admissions platform, by 2028 and adding 15,000 places in 2027–28. Infrastructure plans comprised up to 4 billion euros in preferential loans for school improvements by 2030 and 1 billion euros for university sites by 2029—planned financing, not money already spent. Student-support announcements included index-linked grants from 2027, alongside renewed commitments to universal 1 euro meals and existing housing plans.

The unresolved demands help explain why concessions have not ended the movement. SNES-FSU welcomed signs of movement but criticized the absence of salary revaluation and questioned financing and implementation. The FAGE, Union Étudiante, UNEF and Union Syndicale Lycéenne called for further action after the Matignon meeting. On November 2, the education minister described remaining school disruptions as limited, but reporting also recorded continuing blockades. Neither a reduced number of blockades after the school holidays nor an invitation to consult demonstrates collective acceptance of the package.

Political negotiation is coordinated by the prime minister's office, Matignon, with the education and higher-education ministries responsible for substantive proposals. The government's five workstreams covered staffing, buildings, school timetables, orientation and pupils' participation.

Public-order management operates on a separate track through the Interior Ministry, prefects, police and gendarmerie. Reuters reported a planned deployment of 70,000 police for the Halloween protest period.

On October 6, the Nancy administrative court suspended a Vosges restriction because its geographical scope and duration were insufficiently defined. On October 5, the Rouen administrative court upheld different local restrictions after considering their scope, duration and the reported risks. Together, these decisions show why "the state" should not be treated as a single actor: administrative orders, security operations and independent judicial scrutiny can pull in different directions.

The French negotiating pattern cannot be projected onto Tirana without consideration for Albania's own complex affairs. Reuters reported on October 29 that Prime Minister Edi Rama was offering dialogue and economic relief, including cheaper fuel and greater support for poor households, while also proposing punitive measures around violent protests. Euronews Albania reported that student protesters rejected his invitation and campus mobilization continued on November 2.  

The European Commission and the EU delegation called for lawful, proportionate policing and constructive dialogue; the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly made a similar appeal. Separately, Tirana prosecutors opened an investigation into protest-related injuries and suspected disproportionate police force, working with the Police Oversight Agency.

Why the European layer still matters

The EU's single market is a highly integrated one, but even then, authority over education, housing, public spending and delivery of services remains distributed among Brussels, national governments and subnational administrations. The European Commission normally proposes EU legislation, while the European Parliament and Council participate in its adoption. Education primarily remains a member-state responsibility, with the EU supporting and coordinating; housing, too, is principally governed by national and local authorities, even though EU financing and economic rules can shape the environment.

This architecture does not necessarily make reform impossible, but it disperses responsibility and multiplies potential veto points. A problem shared by several countries is not necessarily one that a single EU law can solve. Even when political agreement exists, implementation can be delayed by budget negotiations, administrative capacity and disputes among landlords, tenants, businesses, unions and regional governments.

Spain in particular offers a vivid case. On October 2, the Congress of Deputies voted down two emergency housing decrees involving tenancy extensions, rent regulation and protections for renters. On October 6, Pedro Sánchez's government approved two renewed decree-laws containing 21 measures. Official statements acknowledged that key provisions still faced uncertainty over ratification – a reminder that policy response can itself become the next battlefield in a political crisis.

Multi-level governance can further distort accountability. Citizens often direct their anger towards a national governing body, which may point to European rules, international prices or a complicated fiscal position. Local authorities may cite inadequate transfers from central government. That cycle of blame can intensify distrust even when each actor identifies a genuine constraint.

Europe's deeper crisis: Who can make reform credible?

From France's classrooms and Albania's campuses to Spain's rental market and Italy's organized labour, the unrest of autumn 2026 should not be treated as a handful of unrelated disturbances. The deeper warning lies in a potentially vicious self-reinforcing cycle: weak growth, strained public services and stalled reform generate stronger demands for action, while governments appear increasingly unable to produce improvements that citizens can see and feel.

External shocks intensify the strain. Russia's conflict with Ukraine and the confrontation involving the United States, Israel and Iran have reshaped supply chains, energy trading and security priorities. Their costs travel through industrial inputs, household bills and public finances. Even when wholesale prices retreat from crisis peaks, previous increases in the general price level do not automatically reverse. The experience of temporary relief followed by persistently high prices can deepen the conviction that the economic settlement itself has changed for the worse.

Conversely, energy security, defense spending and the scale of investment required for industrial transformation compete with claims on housing, hospitals, education and income support. The distributive question is unavoidable: Who bears the costs of transition, and who receives its benefits? For ordinary households, the answer is determined less by abstract indicators of European resilience than by whether wages cover bills and whether public institutions continue to function reliably.

Artificial intelligence (AI) adds a new strain of uncertainty. Exposure to generative AI is not equivalent to observed job destruction: the ILO stresses the continued need for human input and the importance of social dialogue. Yet uncertainty over changing tasks and career pathways can reshape expectations before large employment effects are measurable.

AI is also entering the government's proposed response to educational uncertainty. The October 26 announcement listed an AI-enriched guidance tool among options for the future admissions system; it did not announce that such a system was already operating. As such, the issue becomes a question of whether technical optimization serves publicly debated educational purposes or narrows pupils' aspirations to whatever an existing dataset makes predictable.

Where living costs remain high and established institutions struggle to deliver, demonstrations can become recurring outlets for dissatisfaction rather than isolated policy disputes. This does not automatically benefit the far right, however. The same grievances can potentially support demands for redistribution and universal services, as the American democratic-socialist comparison suggests, or be recast through migration, national sovereignty and hostility to European institutions.  

Such accounts may attract support by making a complex crisis appear legible and actionable. But winning an argument about blame is not the same as solving the underlying problem. European states do not possess the same institutional machinery as the US federal government. Euro-area members, in particular, share monetary policy and operate within common fiscal and market frameworks. Despite this, restricting immigration, challenging Brussels or invoking national sovereignty will not, on its own, produce new homes, qualified teachers, cheaper energy or a competitive industrial base.

The EU is therefore left to grapple with a difficult question for every political body seeking to turn discontent into power: How much can it change, and how much of the economic predicament must it inherit? Nationalist parties may redirect migration or policing policy; a democratic-socialist administration may seek greater redistribution and public provision. Neither approach completely removes the practical requirements of investment, administrative competence and political coalition-building. If a government cannot deliver, anger may simply acquire a new target.

Beyond the spectacle of disorder

The most misleading feature of the claim that "Europe is in chaos" is not simply its exaggeration of street violence, but the way it reduces a set of structural economic and political problems to a visual contest between order and disorder. A burning barricade is immediate, dramatic and highly shareable; the years of underinvestment, housing scarcity and administrative failure that may lie behind public anger are much harder to photograph.

Europe's decisive question now is not how to clear demonstrators from the streets for a few days. It is how to distribute the costs and rewards of economic transition as the older bargain among growth, social protection and political promises comes under strain. This is a challenge that extends far beyond the reach of the EU's borders, as Albania illustrates, and one that cuts to the heart of European integration: can member states reconcile competing national interests and turn the promise of shared prosperity into outcomes that citizens recognize?

Unless those questions receive credible answers, a return to calm will not eliminate the conditions for another confrontation to arise. The challenge is not only to prevent violence, but to sustain institutions through which students, workers and other affected groups can turn grievances into enforceable commitments.