France’s educational crisis and Spain’s housing squeeze won’t be fixed by more government meddling.
Over the past several weeks, student demonstrations have surged across France, and on Friday the protesters pledged to carry on, with 141 schools nationwide shut.
The demonstrations were triggered on September 21 at Saint-Exupéry high school in a suburb north of Paris, protesting staffing shortages and a lack of resources. Pupils joined striking teachers at the school, igniting a nationwide wave of protests that grew more confrontational. A 15-year-old boy lost his hand outside a high school in Lens, a town in the northern part of the country, and a headteacher was doused with gasoline.
France is not alone in facing domestic unrest within Europe. In Spain, thousands have taken to the streets to condemn the housing crisis after an 87-year-old woman in Madrid was evicted for being unable to cope with rapidly rising rents, and she subsequently died. The protests have pushed Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez to call a snap election.
These seemingly unrelated disputes trace back to evident failures in government policy. Yet in both cases, demonstrators seek to address their grievances by pressing for more government action.
France’s education system is highly centralized. The central government oversees recruitment, assignments, salaries, and the curriculum, while local authorities handle building maintenance. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has observed that French schools enjoy less autonomy than many other advanced economies and has urged giving individual schools more control over their operations. In a 2020 OECD report, more than half of lower-secondary education decisions in France were made at the central level (vs. about a quarter across the OECD), while only around 10 percent were decided at the school level.
France’s carte scolaire (school map) system means that parents do not have the freedom to choose the schools their children attend. The government assigns schools based on where families live. Families can request exemptions or opt into the country’s heavily regulated, state-subsidized private-school sector.
Politicians have used the protests to rally support for increased funding for education. But France already spends more per student than many of the OECD’s highest-performing systems, and the outcomes are deteriorating. More than one in three French 15-year-olds now fail to achieve basic proficiency in mathematics, a sharp rise from ten years earlier; the share of low performers has climbed 12 percentage points in math and 11 points in reading since 2015. France’s 2025 results in the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment—assessing math, science, and reading—are “among the lowest ever” recorded and well below levels seen a decade earlier.
The OECD itself notes that there is “room for efficiency gains” in France’s education spending. Nicolas Marques of the pro-market Institut économique Molinari argues that the solution is not simply more money, but greater school autonomy, including giving schools much more control over hiring teachers, organization, and teaching methods.
France’s education challenge is colliding with the broader squeeze on public finances. The sizable pension bill—France currently spends around 14 percent of GDP on pensions—and a growing budget deficit, which reached 5.8 percent of GDP in 2024, have compelled the government to impose cuts elsewhere, while rising borrowing costs leave less fiscal room. While the French situation is particularly acute, a larger share of public spending driven by retirees poses a challenge for much of Europe.
Spain’s housing crisis likewise stems from big-government dynamics. The Bank of Spain estimated that, from 2021 to 2025, the country accumulated a housing shortfall of about 750,000 units as household formation outpaced new construction. In 2024 alone, roughly 240,000 new households formed while only 92,000 homes were completed. The rental market is grappling with a substantial supply shortage, with long-term rentals shrinking by 33 percent across Spain from 2019 to 2024, including declines of 46 percent in Madrid and 75 percent in Barcelona.
“As for housing, [government policies] have created this crisis,” says Diego Sánchez de la Cruz, head of research at the Instituto Juan de Mariana in Spain. “With rent control comes scarcity, and that’s essentially what has happened.”
Spain has steadily tightened rent regulation over the past several years. Catalonia introduced rent controls in 2020, and Spain’s 2023 Housing Law allowed governments to designate “stressed” housing markets where new rents can be capped by a government reference index. Although rents initially fell in controlled areas, landlords increasingly shifted properties into seasonal and temporary leases outside the traditional rent-control regime, prompting the government to tighten the rules further.
Yet the political response has been to double down. Rather than liberalizing the housing market to expand supply, politicians continue to advocate weakening property rights even further—suggesting, in Sánchez de la Cruz’s words, that “private property should be…disregarded in the name of simply providing free housing for everyone.”
Roxana Nicula, CEO of the pro-market Spanish think tank Fundalib, says the protests reflect a genuine scarcity crisis but “are being instrumentalized clearly for electoral purposes.” Nicula believes this will ultimately empower both ends of the political spectrum.
In both France and Spain, the public has a right to be angry about government failure. But the belief that more government intervention is the cure is misguided.
