A Europe incapable of listening is preparing its own crisis. The entire burden of the future cannot fall on the shoulders of young people.
By Federico FUBINI
This month, over a million young people, mostly students, have taken to the streets in more than a dozen European countries. They have done so in Italy and France, but also in Germany, Austria, Spain, Greece, Belgium, Portugal, Albania and Serbia. No one can say that the wave of protests has risen and spread to all these countries by chance, but neither is it a completely unusual phenomenon.
It is not the first time, of course, that in a Europe that has seen a decline in fertility in recent decades and has not wanted to leave the responsibility for the future to the younger generation, protests similar to those of 1968 have erupted. And it is not the first time that these phenomena have appeared like this: in successive waves, crossing borders through digital coordination, unpredictable and through which it is difficult to distinguish the force of order from that of chaos.
Fifteen years ago, the Arab Spring filled the squares across the Maghreb and the Middle East, starting with a small group of young people on Facebook, in a Tunisian desert town. Today, epidemic phenomena of this kind are being repeated in Europe. And, just as fifteen years ago, it can be said that no one really controls them: neither those who instigate them, nor those who would like to suppress them.
However, compared to the Arab Spring, today everything is different: these young people are protesting within countries with consolidated democracies (Serbia is an exception so far) and are not aiming to change the political system (again, with the exception of Serbia). Everything, or almost everything, is also different from the countries where protests are erupting today. After all, the second wave of inflation, caused by wars, was the spark that ignited the protests.
But in Italy and France, the core of the demands is related to the sharing of university costs, the possibility of securing affordable housing in student cities, the cost of living, access to healthcare. In Spain, Portugal or Greece, the focus is more directly on a housing crisis that particularly affects young people.
In Germany, there is widespread fear of the return of compulsory military service. In Belgrade, hundreds of thousands of young Serbians could no longer stand President Aleksandar Vučić and his autocratic apparatus, which had long been open to Russian and Chinese influence. The methods, of course, are also different: from attacks on shop windows in Milan or Paris, to the police breaking through barricades with armored vehicles in Barcelona, or the people who set fire to the town hall tower in Limoges, unacceptable behavior that should not be confused with the hundreds of thousands of people who peacefully line up in France, Italy or Spain; or with the young people who in Portugal set up tents in the Praça do Rossio in Lisbon or the Praça de João I in Porto.
However, a common thread can be discerned. Behind the wave of demonstrations of 1968 stood a generation largely unknown in the demographics of the time, determined to force the older generation to share with it the fruits of economic and cultural growth. In this wave of protests, the opposite is happening. On the streets is a younger generation, already a minority for some time due to the decline in birth rates; therefore, a generation less important to a political system and an ecosystem of businesses trying to gain numbers where they are, among the elderly with many interests, therefore many votes, and with a higher purchasing power.
And if the generation of 1968 sought to share the fruits of economic growth, this generation demands that the costs of stagnation in Europe not be dumped all on its shoulders: on those who arrived last.
He demands that the education system restore more dignity to young people, at a time when artificial intelligence threatens to wipe out millions of jobs and the value of years of study. He demands dignified employment contracts, in a labor market that is, in part, split in two: on the one hand, the protected (including union leaders), and on the other, workers with insecure contracts with insufficient protection. He demands that the globalization of mass tourism, in search of short-term rentals, does not drive residents out of their cities. He demands a credible Europe that is not content with merely submitting to the policies of powers like China in industry, the United States in technology and energy, and Russia in matters of war.
It demands that climate change not become the next destroyer of the middle class, with air conditioning and green neighborhoods designed to make heat waves increasingly affordable only for the wealthiest.
He asks, as always in these cases, for many things. Perhaps too many. He also asks for things for which he himself has made it difficult to find democratic solutions in the city: is it possible to ask for a state for the Palestinian people, but without any ambiguity in the stance towards Hamas?
Is it possible to defend democracy and an open economy without rejecting the centuries-old civil progress of the West? And why does such a large part of Italian left-wing anti-fascism, when faced with the alternative, side with the very embodiment of fascism in this century, Vladimir Putin? However, for all these possibilities – almost a certainty – that the children and grandchildren of Moscow’s maneuvers will once again seek a chance to incite and profit from chaos, it can be said that it is very reductive to take some slogans heard at protests as an argument for not listening to the millions of young people in the squares of Europe, treating them simply as a public order problem to be managed with bans, water cannons and security decrees.
It’s not like that. They are, in their strangeness and diversity, ordinary people. And they demand to be taken seriously.
(La Repubblica)