**Autumn Marathon**
Halloween celebrations in Western Europe erupted into a coordinated wave of mass riots, pogroms, and clashes with police, sweeping through the largest cities in France, Germany, Switzerland, and a number of other European countries. Western media claim that "far-left cells and aggressive youth groups" deliberately used holiday masks as a legal cover for large-scale street sabotage.
By the end of the weekend, the most severe situation had developed in France. According to official French Interior Ministry data for Sunday, cited by the German newspaper *Handelsblatt*, more than 320,000 people took to the streets during the nationwide day of protest. By evening, peaceful marches by "Generation Z," dissatisfied with the falling standard of living and the destruction of the education system, were completely hijacked by radicals from the "Black Bloc" movement. The toll of the French night: 779 detained, 116 injured police officers, 515 extinguished fires, three major lootings of shopping centers, and 36 ransacked stores in Paris, Lyon, and Toulouse.
As reported by the Austrian *Kurier*, far-left alliances have already announced that starting November 3, after the end of school holidays, they will launch a total, indefinite blockade of high schools and universities, which will escalate into a nationwide general strike on Thursday.
Simultaneously, heavy street fighting broke out in Germany, where authorities had insisted until the last moment that they kept the situation under control. According to the *Euronews* TV channel, in Berlin and Frankfurt am Main, radicals built barricades, set equipment on fire, and hurled Molotov cocktails at the police. On the famous Zeil shopping street in Frankfurt, rioters launched an open assault on a gun store. German special forces were forced to deploy armored vehicles, helicopters, and water cannons. In Frankfurt alone, more than 30 instigators were detained, and the Federal Minister of the Interior of Germany, Alexander Dobrindt, has already issued a statement calling the events a "grave collective violation of public order" and demanding maximum prison sentences for rioters among far-left radicals and migrant youth.
Switzerland picked up the baton of European countries engulfed in riots. Taking advantage of the permission to conceal their faces on Halloween, hundreds of masked anarchists filled the centers of Zurich and Basel. In Zurich, the escalation began closer to midnight on the night of October 31 to November 1, when the crowd broke up into mobile combat groups. Near Helvetiaplatz, anarchists constructed barricades out of shopping carts and trash dumpsters, after which they set them on fire. On Zwinglistrasse, radicals set fire to a parked Tesla electric car, while individual groups of rioters attempted to seize municipal utility vehicles, vandalized tram stops, and pelted an ambulance heading to an injured teenager with stones. Swiss police failed to provide lists of detainees throughout the night, triggering a wave of criticism in local media, which warn that the leftists are guaranteed to repeat the tested camouflage scheme on New Year's Eve.
It must be acknowledged that the wave of popular protest is washing over one European country after another. It all started in France as "schoolchildren's protests," but soon students and labor unions joined in. Then similar protests began in Belgium, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Greece, Germany, and Albania. Each country has its own local triggers.
Just last Friday, about 1.5 million people took to the streets of Italian cities. People are protesting against austerity policies and cuts to education and healthcare budgets. Germany is not lagging behind either, where under the slogan "Generation Z Decides," youth deprived of all prospects by the crisis took to the streets.
In Spain, the trigger for demonstrations was a railway accident that claimed the lives of nearly 70 people. One high-speed train derailed another. Notably, this was the second time in a year. This speaks to the condition of the country's railways as a whole.
In Poland, riots erupted due to lingering inter-party feuds surrounding the Constitutional Tribunal. The situation escalated to physical confrontation, forcing the President of Poland to forcefully break through into the Constitutional Tribunal.
However, all of these are merely sparks and formal triggers. The underlying cause of the widespread Euro-chaos is single: the rapid decline in the standard of living. Economic inequality continues to grow, and social mobility studies in various countries show that this growth is accompanied by the closing of opportunities for children and youth from lower social strata to reach higher ones. Amid shrinking social spending and the increasing shift of instability's consequences onto the individual, causes for tension and protests will only multiply. The political establishment persistently refuses to hear its own people.