Are student protests being manipulated ahead of France's presidential election?

Are student protests being manipulated ahead of France's presidential election?

The French prime minister has accused the radical left of weaponising the high school movement for electoral advantage

France’s appetite for protest is famous across Europe.

In recent years, we have repeatedly seen farmers furious about expensive regulations throwing manure at local mayoral offices, while masked youths have periodically lobbed homemade grenades at riot police in deprived city suburbs.

For more than three weeks now, thousands of students have blocked entrances to high schools and carried their complaints into the streets.

This Saturday, hundreds of fresh demonstrations have been called across France.

Students are expected to be joined by trade unions and leading figures from the so-called “yellow vest” movement.

This week, France’s prime minister, Sébastien Lecornu, suggested that student anger was being exploited as politics intensifies ahead of next year’s presidential election.

(yellow vests) protested against rising living costs for more than a year from 2018 - becoming one of the longest-running protest movements in French history.

Jérôme Rodrigues, a prominent gilets jaunes activist, has used Instagram to urge people to take part in Saturday’s demonstrations.

The protests should give a voice to those who “want to be able to live decently, no longer have to count every cent, and no longer have to choose between eating and driving”, he said in a video.

“Anger has no political party. An empty fridge has no political party,” he added.

So what is happening in the EU’s second-largest economy?

Civil unrest, government borrowing costs at eye-watering highs, a deeply split French parliament and what looks like a revolving door of frustrated French prime ministers - six prime ministers in the past five years - all saying they want to cut their country’s public debt.

Is France at breaking point - and what does this all mean for the eurozone currency, of which France is such a major part?

“You can’t compare France to the Greece debt crisis of 2012 or Argentina in 2001. And the financial markets know it,” economist Anne-Laure Delatte told me.

She is a CNRS Tenured Researcher in the Economics Department at Paris Dauphine University; a familiar voice in French media debates about the precarious state of the country’s public debt.

“The markets already recognised in 2024 that we would have a budgetary problem after [snap] elections left parliament deeply divided between three [opposing political] blocs but they also realise France is a big country with the ability to raise taxes if necessary.”

“Our situation is more like the UK in 2023 with Liz Truss,” Delatte argues, referring to the then UK prime minister’s so-called mini budget, which caused a sharp fall in the pound, a jump in government bond yields and soaring mortgage rates.

“The crisis was relatively short-lived because the markets recognised the UK had the financial tools to right itself.”

“Here in France it would be painful, but a 4% increase in VAT would raise the 120bn euros needed to plug government debt. Investors know that,” she concludes.

Perhaps, in theory. And, as Delatte also notes, the European Central Bank would probably step in if France’s finances collapsed to the point where other European economies would be affected.

But with so many French citizens already clearly unhappy with the status quo, imagine the reaction if taxes were raised, or welfare and education budgets cut further.

(freedom, equality and fraternity), but that is certainly not the feeling you get on angry streets and in viral social media posts.

Radical-left LFI leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon (C) has been accused of exploiting the student protests ahead of next year’s elections

I met 17-year-olds Maxime, Madeleine and Elodie this week, sitting on large green dustbins that have been used to block the entrance to their high school as part of the weeks-long protest.

They told me conditions were bad enough here, in Paris’s 3rd district, with holes in classroom walls, growing class sizes and too few teachers, but the teenagers were well aware, they said, that the situation was much worse in the capital’s deprived suburbs.

“France likes to speak of égalité,” they told me, “but the reality is the poor here are discriminated against, while the rich benefit.”

None of them will be old enough to vote in France’s presidential election next spring, but they questioned whether the changing faces of those in power made much difference anyway.

The three young women said large-scale protests seemed the only way to make French authorities listen.

They are part of a defiant French tradition.

Among crowds of protesting students walking through Paris on Thursday, I met several mothers, with placards around their necks reading: “Mums in solidarity.”

Were they there to protest or to protect their children, I asked? “Both!” came the emphatic reply.

Gwen, 37, said she and other mothers were taking turns every morning to coordinate between students and police at their local school occupation.

This followed growing accusations of police brutality, denied by France’s interior ministry, during protests earlier this month in which hundreds were injured and a 15-year-old boy in the town of Lens lost a hand.

France’s interior minister has since suspended the use of stun grenades by police at high school demonstrations.

Gwen told me she did not mind that her son was missing weeks of school because of the occupations. “It’s a far better education for him to wake up to his civic duty and to fight for what is just in society,” she said.

At Thursday’s demonstration I also met 17-year-old Lola and her mother, Sandrine, sharing a placard saying revolution was the most beautiful expression of humanity.

“My mum took to the streets in ’68,” Lola said proudly. “Now it’s my turn. No point in waiting for the presidential election in France. We want change now.”

Student protests in Paris in May 1968 are legendary in France. Demands for better education drew workers into the marches, which became the biggest general strike in French history. It set the benchmark for revolutionary upheaval for a generation and is credited with opening up new opportunities for the French left.

Now, though, with six months to go before an already tense presidential election in France, there are accusations that the hard left, under presidential hopeful Jean-Luc Mélenchon, is weaponising student frustration.

“Members of [Mélenchon’s] France Insoumise (LFI) are instrumentalising the high school movement for their electoral advantage,” Sébastien Lecornu said on Wednesday. He accused them of encouraging protests and then going through the motions of condemning any violence.

“This hypocrisy damages France,” Lecornu said.

But “Mélenchon for President!” is a chant you often hear among students in the streets.

Supporters praise his call for a wealth tax in France, for lowering the voting age to 16 and for being the only presidential candidate to visit French schools to inspect their condition, several demonstrators told me.

For Marine Le Pen, the nationalist anti-immigration frontrunner in France’s presidential race, the answer is to cut the country’s €11bn contribution to the EU budget.

There is, however, reason to doubt that any new French president, from the left or the right, will be able to break the deadlock over France’s finances.

France is far from alone in Europe right now in facing an ageing population, a generous welfare state to fund and a national economy squeezed by outside pressures such as US President Donald Trump’s trade tariffs and the war in the Persian Gulf.

Whether in France, Germany, Sweden or Italy, there is an underlying tension between politicians who hesitate to tell voters the truth about shrinking public finances, the defence establishment’s demand for higher defence spending and citizens’ insistence on better public services.

In France, that pressure is especially intense. French public spending, at about 57% of GDP, is among the highest in wealthy countries worldwide.

Social spending, especially on pensions, is exceptionally large, while French citizens pay one of the highest overall tax and social contribution burdens in Europe. In short, they expect strong welfare and public services in return.

But economist Anne-Laure Delatte does not think a new president will solve her country’s financial headache.

“We need constitutional change. A new system. A new Republic,” she told me.

“Our Fifth Republic is centred around a powerful president. Parliament is there to block him or her rather than to find consensus or to make new laws.”

For France to move forward, she says, that must change.

The French parliamentary election after the 2027 presidential vote is likely to be just as divided as ever, she believes: “We need a system where MPs have more power and should learn consensus and coalition-building from our European neighbours.”

In her view, education had to be protected and funding distributed more fairly. It was an investment in France’s financial future, she told me.

“Our current system of inequality in schooling and low wages for teachers means we miss out on benefiting from the best and brightest across French society. That is not only unfair on individuals but our economy ultimately loses out on innovation and productivity.”

Rewriting France’s constitution is not on the agenda at the moment. So what about the immediate future, I asked centrist politician Anne-Catherine Loisier.

She is a senator for the Centrist Union in France’s upper house of parliament and vice president of the parliamentary group for sciences and technology.

Loisier, like almost every leading French politician across the political spectrum, says the protesting students “must feel heard”.

“Our budgets are limited,” she admitted, “but you don’t necessarily need more money. You can make improvements by redistributing funding better. Education is a regional competence in France. Every region should look at local needs and address priorities accordingly. That action can be taken immediately.”

I asked Loisier whether she agreed with UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham, the former mayor of Greater Manchester, that regions should be given more powers. “Absolutely,” she replied. “France has traditionally been very Paris-centric but so much could be improved by decentralising the country.”

“My France isn’t broken. I don’t recognise that image you see portrayed in the media. My country is made up of lots of Frances. Paris, the regions; northern and southern France. We need to give power back to the people. Local governments can look people in the eye directly, so voters feel they have power over their own future, rather than politicians handing them their fate from up high in Paris.”

“That way I hope we can restore voters’ - and students’ - faith in politics.”

It is a promise you hear from politicians - right and left - ahead of France’s huge elections next year.

But opinion polls here, as across most of Europe, suggest public faith in the political class is in short supply.