When youths move, society changes: The 2026 barricades, By Owei Lakemfa

The ongoing mass protests in France were ignited and led by students. They are the segment of society to which all shades and classes of society belong. When such a class reaches consensus and hits the streets, as it has done in parts of Europe in the last few weeks, change in society is likely to follow. Otherwise, society itself is endangered and violent change might become inevitable. The situation becomes even more combustible when workers join, waving flags of unity and joining the youths at the barricades.

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The situation in France is similar to its 1968 Students Uprising, when the parents and grandparents of today’s protesters seized the country. Over 10 million people took to the streets, and the then French President Charles de Gaulle, on May 29, 1968, fled to Germany. When the famous war general returned, he dissolved the National Assembly and called new elections.

The 1968 French student demands were for more classrooms to reduce university overcrowding, democracy in schools, educational reforms, and a world free from injustice, such as the United States’ genocide in Vietnam. Workers weighed in with strikes and factory occupations. They demanded higher salaries, better work conditions, and social reforms.

Today, 58 years later, the demands are virtually the same, except that high school students have reduced the average age of the protesters. Unfazed by the deployment of over 70,000 police officers, they are protesting against teacher shortages, dilapidated school structures, cuts in school budgets, and inflation. By mid-October 2026, over 6,500 protesters, most of them minors, had been arrested. Over the October 17–18, 2026 weekend clashes alone, at least 2,500 arrests were made, while, in the October 24 protests, 1,435 persons were arrested. Even with the clashes and arrests in cities like Paris, Lyon, Bordeaux, and Marseille, the French government was in dialogue with the protesters, including reaching consensus on routes to take in order to minimize destruction of public property and offering concessions.

However, as the French authorities try to reach understanding with the protesters, there are world leaders who want to divert attention and even escalate the crisis by urging them to clamp down on the protesters, whom they present as enemies. For instance, US President Donald Trump said the causes of the protests were not as stated by the protesters but were actually about immigration and integration. He wrote in his Truth Social post: “What’s happening in France is nothing less than out-of-control mass migration. This isn’t about schools; this is about Islam wanting to take over a once great country!”

Trump told Americans: “Just look at France… Paris is going to be a Muslim city very soon.” He added: “France is burning! The immigration of people from an entirely different world, people with hatred in their hearts, has shattered that once great country.” He added: “Emmanuel (Macron) should have closed his borders a long time ago. I told him to do it.”

Unstable Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu toed the Trump line, claiming France had “ceded to an invasion by Islamist extremists.” Equally, the Prime Ministers of Poland, Donald Tusk, and Hungary, Peter Magyar, sang the same hymn as Trump. However, the French leadership would not fall for such nonsense. Macron responded: “There has been a foreign manipulation of information since then, and that has led to some unacceptable and stupid comments from many foreign leaders.”

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Pointing out that some of the international postings on the protests were fake, he said: “We’ve seen AI images that show scenes that never happened in France. There are people who have stated that we were invaded by hordes of migrants and Islamists, which is completely false.” Macron’s rejection of false imputations is correct, although he does not go as far as admitting that the causes of the protests are mainly due to the economic crises the country is facing. Production has taken a downturn, with manufacturing, agriculture, and the broad industrial sectors contracting.

By the second quarter of 2026, France’s public debt had reached €3.5955 trillion, or 119 percent of GDP. Its deficit is at 5.4 percent of GDP in 2026, in comparison to the European Union’s 3 percent limit.

Since 2002, its debt has doubled as a share of GDP. Its pension deficits are projected to reach €15 billion by 2035. This is one of the grounds on which the trade unions joined the protests. France’s position has worsened in recent years with its increasing loss of the resources it has freely scooped for decades from its former African colonies. It lost its uranium and mining control in the Niger Republic. Its direct exploitation of countries like Burkina Faso, Mali, Guinea, and Senegal is being challenged, with even pliant Gabon giving notice of discontinuation. But France is not the only European country reeling under protests. In Albania, once a social haven, high school fees, corruption allegations, and rising mass unemployment sent the students into the streets. Clashes were recorded in Tirana and a number of cities. Protests rocked Italian cities like Milan, Turin, and Rome over high education costs and rising hardship. The protests in the Spanish cities of Madrid and Barcelona centred around high housing costs and pensions, while those in Portugal were on the cost of living and housing.

In Europe generally, the student-worker alliances centre around a better education and work environment. But the country that has now taken the crown of student action is Serbia. There, rather than simply organize protests, the students decided to take over power by forming an opposition coalition against the ruling Serbian Progressive Party, SNS, which has been in power for the last fourteen years. They organized a non-partisan electoral list of professionals and social activists. In the October 25, 2026 parliamentary elections, the student coalition won 52.7 percent of the votes and 140 of 250 seats in the National Assembly. The ruling party secured 39.17 percent of the votes and 104 seats. Voter turnout was 68.78 percent. President Aleksandar Vucic conceded defeat.

But while the European students are awake to their responsibilities, in many parts of the world, the students are sleeping. In Nigeria, the largest Black population in the world, many students and youths are actually snoring as the struggle for the future of their country in the 2027 general elections gets underway.

More criminally, many of those who are awake are submitting themselves to be used as thugs and hired urchins by politicians whose antecedents are not secret. Apart from politicians and their children imposing leaders on students, there was a time when the president of the central National Association of Nigerian Students, NANS, was not even a student! However, these do not mean that the barricades cannot go up in such countries. When the students and youths move, society changes.

Owei Lakemfa, a former secretary general of African workers, is a human rights activist, journalist and author.

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