Our country has been caught in a frenetic spiral of geopolitical tension, the management of mass migration, and, ultimately, the collapse of the current government after Maricarmen’s eviction. Taken together, these factors have caused everything that has happened in France over the past two weeks to be overshadowed, going largely unnoticed by most of public opinion. And yet, our neighboring country has burst into flames just months away from presidential elections that will decide not only the future of the French nation but that of the European Union as a whole.
But what has happened in France for the storm of all storms to have been unleashed? In truth, the current situation had been simmering for a long time, the result of the accumulated disappointments that the end of the Macron era has brought with it. The president who rose to power promising heaven for France will leave behind a country torn apart, highly polarized, a public opinion utterly disappointed, an economy in a precarious state, rising inflation, and material conditions that offer little hope for his successor.
“The current situation had been simmering for a long time, the result of the accumulated disappointments that the end of the Macron era has brought with it”
If we do not go back too far in time, one could say that part of what is happening now takes root at least in the period of political instability opened after the 2024 legislative elections. These left a country ungovernable at a moment when ambitious reforms were needed with a parliamentary majority that would facilitate decision-making. With a public deficit and a debt-to-GDP ratio that kept growing and that are currently leaving the country on the ropes, structural reforms of some kind were expected, whether in terms of reducing spending or increasing revenue, and yet none of this arrived. Not only did it not arrive, but it swept away several premiers and has the current one in a truly precarious position, with enormous difficulties to approve decent budgets for Macron’s final year in office.
Public Education, at the Center of the Protests
The succession of prime ministers, also a product of his lack of efficacy in brokering pacts across the political spectrum, left pension reform effectively dead. And that is not all. In a country with relative energy self-sufficiency and, a priori, less exposed to the effects of the Russia–Ukraine conflict, we find citizens who are paying more and more on their energy bills and who have lost a considerable purchasing power. Therefore, by the time the Lecornu cabinet announced cuts in various allocations, including education, everything collapsed.
Thousands of secondary school students took to the streets en masse to protest and to express their anger at a State that was about to deal a final blow to the public education system, which has clearly deteriorated over time. What for decades was seen as a symbol of the success of that revolutionary heritage that trained citizens free and equal now conveys the sense of having failed to integrate the new generations of French people.
French public education is poorly funded, with infrastructure in dire need of improvement and with the sense of being one of the first targets when it comes to cutting state spending. And that is why they have had enough, with a fury that has unleashed widespread disturbances like we have not seen in decades. Consequently, the main unions and social movements have shown their support for these protests, though not everyone agrees with the “methods” used, at least with the goals to achieve.
“In reality, the current situation had been simmering for a long time, the result of the accumulated disappointments that the end of the Macron era has brought with it”
The situation has escalated to the point that schools have been burned, the streets of French cities filled with barricades and injuries, the most volatile banlieues have fallen into utter chaos, and there are signs of a general strike on the horizon. So much so that the prime minister has promised measures to ease the underfunding that the education sector has suffered for years, though with little effect so far. The protests have already transcended the purely student sphere and are turning the country into a boiling cauldron that threatens to overflow in the days ahead. But even if the protests manage to be channelled and their effects contained, this crisis would be only the prelude to the next.
After all, these are nothing more than the consequences of the twilight of the Macron era, whose mandate will conclude in a climate of deep dissatisfaction, electoral disaffection, and the rise of the Rassemblement National, whose possible victory in the 2027 presidential elections could trigger a quake of such magnitude that it would call into question the very identity of the European Union. Not to mention, this political force is trying to take advantage of these protests, criminalising them without questioning their root and origin. In an attempt to win over conservative voters (it should be remembered that all this is occurring in the pre-electoral period), they promise tougher measures and less tolerance toward protesters, without going into detail about what they would do if they came to power to address the discontent regarding the state of the French public education system. Yet there is one thing the student movement has made clear: they do not want to continue in the same dynamic, and they will do whatever is necessary to make the political class aware of it, no matter the cost, and regardless of who comes to power.
