PARIS ― From a distance, Europe might appear to be on fire as protests and at times destructive rioting convulse cities from Marseille to Milan to Madrid and beyond.
People across an aging continent are contending with slow economic growth and higher costs of groceries, housing and fuel, driven up by the U.S. war with Iran. The economic pain is coupled with the angry malaise of a younger generation disillusioned by the status quo and disaffected by mounting evidence that they will not live as well as their parents or grandparents.
“We’re sick of putting up with empty promises,” Léna Guerrier, a French student activist, declared Sunday on national television, after another day of nationwide protests.
“Today, young people everywhere are demanding the right to a future,” Guerrier said. She added, “We are demanding a break with this old world that has made life difficult, not only in France.”
But behind this European autumn of dissent and discontent, different dynamics are at play in very different countries run by leaders who span the political spectrum — showing that there are no easy solutions, either at the ballot box or in traditional corridors of power.
In France, President Emmanuel Macron, an avowed centrist now nearing the end of his second term, is grappling with an eruption of frustration over rising prices, budget cuts and persistent political paralysis that has yielded seven prime ministers in as many years.
In Spain, Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, Europe’s only socialist heavyweight at the moment, has called snap elections, aiming to capitalize on protests over high housing costs to shore up his minority government. Sanchez is portraying his conservative rivals as favoring landlords and seeking to privatize pensions.
And on the right in Italy, conservative Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, who began her career in the youth organization of a neo-fascist political party, is confronting grievances from anti-government protesters and truckers pinched by rising energy prices.
In an analysis this month, Alberto Alemanno, a professor of European Law at HEC Paris, noted that the immediate trigger of public unrest varies from one country to another: education in France and Belgium, housing in Spain and Portugal, public spending in Italy and accountability demands in Albania.
“What connects them,” Alemanno wrote, “is less a common agenda than a growing sense that the future promises less than the present generation was led to expect.”
For the European Union, of greatest concern are the protests in France, Italy and Spain — three major European countries with leaders from the left, right and center — nations that with Germany form the core political and economic pillars of the European project.
Critics such as President Donald Trump and enemies like Russian President Vladimir Putin are portraying the unrest not as a reaction to economic conditions worsened by the wars in Ukraine and Iran that they started but as evidence of the collapse of Western liberalism and as the poisoned result of unfettered migration.
By Putin’s view, in particular, Europe is not experiencing political setbacks but a deep fracturing of society and failure of democracy itself. The upheaval is also propelling the campaigns of far-right and far-left parties and politicians, including Alternative for Germany, National Rally and France Unbowed in France and Vox in Spain.
According to Alemanno, a “misleading narrative of a pan-European revolt” has allowed scenes of unrest to be taken out of their national context and offered “as proof that a chaotic Europe is ungovernable.”
Gerard Araud, a former French ambassador to Washington, commented that “the crisis brings joy to Moscow, Washington, and others who fan the flames, but its origins are global and shared by liberal democracies.”
In France, hundreds of thousands of protesters returned to the streets on Saturday, largely marching under the eye of a vast security force deployed by the government to avoid a repeat of the rioting and looting that rattled the country a week earlier.
Weeks of protests that began with student grievances over underfunded schools have ballooned into a catchall display of popular anger, supported by labor unions. People are taking aim at issues including energy prices and the failures of Macron’s centrist administration to lower debt and raise the retirement age over the past decade.
Politicians of all stripes, in Europe and abroad, seized on the images of trash-can fires on the streets and shattered storefronts to amplify their own messages, as European governments came under scrutiny for failing to contain the disorder.
Some nationalist, right-wing leaders blamed the looting in France and Italy on immigration, an explosive issue and common rallying cry in upcoming elections. In coming months, voters will go to the polls in Spain, France, Italy and Poland, where hard-right parties are challenging Europe’s embattled centrists.
French officials say protesters represent a broad cross-section of society. Macron has denounced the targeting of immigrants, while Meloni’s conservative government in Italy has leaned into it. Her party and its far-right coalition partner blamed “second-generation” Italians for vandalism in Milan last week, as Meloni is challenged by a rival further to her right ahead of next year’s election.
European governments rank among the world’s biggest spenders on welfare, but after years of expensive global crises, including the covid pandemic and Russia’s war in Ukraine, several nations are wrestling with anemic economic growth, stagnant wages and widening inequality between the rich and poor.
The challenges appear most acute in France, where the state is straining under a pile of debt and trying to cut public spending ahead of a spring presidential election.
Analysts expect that the riots will boost front-runner Marine Le Pen and her nationalist, Euroskeptic, anti-immigrant platform. Le Pen formally launched her campaign on Sunday, promising a “renaissance” for France and “zero-tolerance” policing.
“We are not living through the end of the world but the end of a world, their world,” she told a convention of her far-right National Rally party.
Debt payments now consume a mammoth share of French state spending and could soon overtake education or defense. The government spent heavily on aid for businesses and civilians during the pandemic and the energy crisis, and it is now trying to raise defense spending and curb aspects of the social welfare system.
French officials have warned the polarization is showing its capacity to turn violent after a shooting in Trappes, west of Paris, where a gunman killed a young Black man and shot a 12-year-old girl multiple times.
Despite the attention on France, “many of the underlying pressures are visible elsewhere in Europe: strained public finances, stubborn inflation, and politically constrained governments,” according to Jess Middleton, senior Europe analyst at Verisk Maplecroft, a risk intelligence firm.
In Italy this weekend, footage showed a group of protesters in Milan dumping manure and burning a symbolic electricity bill outside the offices of the energy regulator.
Meloni’s government deployed drones and 500 soldiers to contain fresh protests, a week after a rally spiraled into looters ransacking boutiques in downtown Milan and clashing with police. Italy has just approved new anti-rioting rules that make it easier to prosecute minors and hold their parents financially liable for vandalism.
People also took the streets in Florence, Turin and Rome on Saturday.
The protests in Italy first gained traction after truck drivers and farmers blockaded roads in the south of the country, lamenting high fuel prices.
Demonstrators cite a range of grievances, some echoing slogans in France, including students concerns. Some crowds marching Saturday in Milan voiced solidarity with Palestinians; others in Rome protested increased Italian military spending. A major Italian union has called for a strike on Nov. 20 over wages and public services.
In Spain, thousands of people held relatively calm protests in recent weeks over rising housing costs nationwide, prompting Sánchez, the leftist leader of a minority government, to gamble on early elections set for next month.
Some protesters have camped out in Sol Square in Madrid’s city center, calling on the government to take action to limit rent prices and ensure more affordable housing.
In Barcelona, hundreds of young people took to the streets Saturday urging protests via social media and text apps including TikTok and WhatsApp. The demonstration led to looting and skirmishes with police. Authorities detained 128 people, mostly minors.
Catalan Interior Minister Núria Parlon said looters had turned up who had “nothing to do with the right to protest.” Public outcry over high prices and low salaries has prompted trade unions to organize a general strike on Nov. 11 before the start of election campaigning — the first general strike in Spain in more than a decade.
Olivier Faure, head of the center-left Socialist Party in France, noted that the protests were not a monolith and that his country was not alone.
“Look at what’s happening in other European countries. You can see clearly that the youth rising up all over,” Faure said on a Sunday morning television show.
“It is a formidable moment,” Faure said, “and I hope we actually listen to them.”
Ríos reported from Brussels. Stefano Pitrelli in Rome contributed to this report.
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