Falah Mousa · 19 October 2026
The demonstrations are about more than expensive living. They highlight the growing gulf between what European countries pledge and what they can deliver.
Europe’s governments have grown adept at explaining why money is short. Their citizens are growing less receptive. Pupils in France are demanding decent schools. Students and trade unions in Belgium are opposing changes to education and social security. In Portugal the demonstrations are demanding jobs that pay a mortgage. In Italy protests about living costs have merged with opposition to the war. The grievances vary but the question behind them is strikingly similar; after years of patience, what are ordinary Europeans owed?
The French demonstration on 17 October attracted about 550,000 people, said the interior minister, or 800,000, said the CGT union. Beyond the dispute over education, it was a protest against living standards and public services. Smaller demonstrations elsewhere fuelled the sense of a continent in revolt. But at the same time, simultaneous demonstrations do not add up to a common movement, let alone a common programme.
Their importance resides elsewhere. Several governments are finding that the institutions through which Europeans buy security, such as schools, housing markets, employment and social insurance, are themselves posing new sources of insecurity. A temporary subsidy might ease a bill; it cannot restore confidence in a shrinking horizon of expectation.
Take the central role of education. French students’ complaints range from absent teachers, over-crowded classes and dilapidated buildings. These are tangible failures, not abstract statistics which ministers can massage into respectable averages. Moreover, they are the fault of the very institution designed to offset the unfairness of family origins.
A worsening school system, then, has political implications well beyond its spending envelope. For the well-off, the public failure might be an annoyance with a private remedy. For the poor, it may mean the loss of their only possible promotion route. The same belt tightening thus has different implications for those who can afford to avoid its impact.
Belgium’s student protests concern similar educational costs, funding and reforms. So too unions have mobilised against the government’s global economic programme. The potential alliance is also significant: young people anxious about entering the social contract are joining forces with workers anxious about what is left of it.
Housing heightens the conflict. Tens of thousands marched in Lisbon on October 17 in protest at wages which, they said, were unable to cover housing costs and daily expenses. The demonstration followed unrest across the country, including the clearing of a housing protest camp in Porto.
In Spain, housing discontent has proved a durable political issue. Demonstrations across many cities in early October followed weeks of protests about rents, evictions and insufficient tenant protection. The protest camp in Madrid’s Puerta del Sol was heading into its third week on October 17, with demonstrators considering whether to leave the square and start campaigning in neighbourhoods and workplaces. Abandoning the square would not signify abandoning the cause.
EU house prices rose 4.7% on average in the second quarter of 2026 compared with a year earlier, according to Eurostat. This does not explain the cause of every protest, but it does help to explain why a political economy focused on employment and wages overlooks a powerful source of discontent: the acquisition of something already owned.
It is an uncomfortable position for governments to be in, and one that could lead to a spiral of action and reaction, with policies boosting asset values creating unaffordability, and policies that help affordability triggering the ire of owners; there is no painless housing settlement where everybody becomes richer.
Then comes inflation. Eurostat’s preliminary figure for September was 3.8 per cent in the euro area, compared to 3.2 per cent in August, meaning even a slowdown would leave households with the accumulated cost of living increases to deal with. Ministers discuss the speed of change; ordinary citizens confront the price at the till.
Public-service deterioration compounds the squeeze. A household can pay more in taxes and essentials while also spending privately to compensate for unreliable provision. Its members need not become unemployed to conclude that the system is failing them. The politically consequential experience is often downward mobility within employment.
Governments are nevertheless confronting quite real limits. The IMF’s assessment of the situation in the euro area this month (October) was for 1.1 per cent growth this year, and 1.2 per cent next year, with a warning that many European countries need more growth and fiscal adjustment to ensure sustainable debt. Ageing, defence and energy transition add to the competition for resources.
Weak growth makes budgeting a more overt contest between groups. For when revenues are rising briskly, governments can accommodate different demands without wading into difficult trade-offs. But when growth falters, a concession to one group is seen as a betrayal by another.
There is a further battleground over who gets to define the demonstrations. Protest organisers want emphasis on unfairness; governments which face burning property want it on order. Violence can transform the political constituency of a protest overnight: some citizens become more sympathetic after seeing injuries to demonstrators; others withdraw support after viewing attacks on police or businesses.
Reporting from France has documented allegations of excessive police force and grievous injuries inflicted, along with violence against officers. These require separate accountability. To characterise peaceful participants as rioters is an injustice and a political risk. To characterise destruction as an inevitable expression of grievance is to give governments an alibi for the grievance itself.
The tensions also happen outside the Union’s borders, but its roots must not be oversimplified as a European phenomenon. In Albania, student demonstrations this month (October) have fused criticism of education and employment with outrage at allegations of corruption. They have attracted backing from opponents of a contentious coastal development who felt that months of relatively peaceful protest had been ignored. The confrontation that has ensued involves as much political power as public money.
What will happen next the European Union?
The most likely scenario in the next six to twelve months is a series of national clashes, partial concessions and renewed protests. Sustained mobilisation requires organisation, money and agreement, while the current shared dissatisfaction lacks any of these. Movements can lose momentum without their participants becoming reconciled to the status quo.
The key difference between the capacity to block a policy and the capacity to form a governing majority. Students, pensioners, tenants, homeowners and small-business owners may agree that the government has failed while disagreeing totally over taxation and spending. Successful opposition can conceal an unsuccessful coalition waiting in the wings.
This creates uncertainty over electoral consequences. Parties of the left may profit if the dominant interpretation is of inequality of opportunity and depleted services. Parties of the right may profit if the dominant interpretation is of disorder and governmental weakness. Incumbents of either persuasion are vulnerable if voters assess competence in terms of the cost and reliability of everyday life.
The EU’s immediate danger is therefore impaired decision-making. A national leader struggling to secure consent at home has less freedom to compromise abroad. Contributions to common programmes become harder to defend. Exceptions become more attractive. Negotiations acquire more veto threats and fewer political champions.
This is not a sign that demonstrators want to quit the Union as a whole. Most of the grievances raised here relate to national or local responsibilities, but national weakness has repercussions in Brussels. The Union rests on the ability of governments to negotiate commitments and then to uphold them at home
The next European budget will embody this constraint. Agreement on the next long-term financial framework for the Union is sought by leaders before the end of 2026. Governments under domestic pressure may seek greater European help while resisting the contributions needed to fund it, making a thinner or delayed compromise a likely outcome of the unrest, even if no government is campaigning against European collaboration.
The forecast should be based on a post marches situation. A continued mobilisation of workers in the transport sector, teachers and other organised groups would suggest that the problem extended beyond another busy Saturday. Implemented reforms would offer better evidence of de-escalation than ministerial pronouncements. Budget setbacks, coalition collapses or a sudden rise in borrowing costs would suggest the opposite. The key question is whether discontent acquires organisation to endure-and whether governments have the wherewithal to respond.
A more negative scenario would involve another energy-price shock coupled with narrower financing conditions and accelerated spending reductions. Governments would be faced with demands for compensation just as their instruments for providing it deteriorated. The Commission’s censure of untargeted energy assistance already signals part of the problem: diffuse relief can deplete scarce resources without focusing on those who need it most.
The more hopeful scenario requires modest promises that have visible results. A replaced teacher counts for more than an education strategy that no parent can judge. A habitable flat counts for more than another statement of affordability. Targeted assistance can alleviate immediate pressure, but housing supply, dependable services and improved productivity decide whether the respite is lasting.
Above all, governments must explain who pays. A programme of restraint is less credible when powerful groups appear exempt from it. An opposition promising painless abundance is no more credible merely because the government is unpopular.
Europe is unlikely to be overturned by these demonstrations. Rather, it is likely to become more difficult to govern: electorally unstable, fiscally limited and increasingly unwilling to take collective commitments. The real risk is the gradual acceptance that public institutions have the capacity to preserve order, but not to improve lives, while the protesters dispute this settlement. Europe’s governments should hope they can provide a better one.