Feliana Citradewi
Riots, a racist shooting, an economy that doesn’t grow. This is not only a French problem, it goes to the majority of Europe.
On October 17 in the evening, the town hall in Limoges was on fire. The whole thing had started a month before at a lycée in Créteil, near Paris. The pupils wanted more teachers, smaller classes and school buildings that are not falling apart. That’s it. Then that night some people looted shops in Paris, in Marseille, in other cities too, and the Interior Ministry says more than 2,600 people were arrested in one day. After that nobody talked about the teachers anymore. Six days later a man drove through Trappes, west of Paris, and shot at people. Investigators say he chose people he thought were Black, Arab or Muslim. So what is going on with France ? A lot of people here are asking that now. Saturday was Halloween and also the third weekend of protests. There were fewer people this time. Some clashes in Paris in the evening, a few hundred arrests, but not the big explosion everybody was scared of. It was definitely quieter. But quieter does not mean fixed.
And there is the economical problem, stagnation flirting with recession. On Friday INSEE said the economy went down 0.1 percent in the third quarter. In the first quarter it went down too, in the second it didn’t move. So technically not a recession, but close. Public debt is already 119 percent of GDP and they expect 121.7 percent in 2027. Before, when there was growth, the government could just spend more to calm people down. Now there is not much money left to do that, and other countries in Europe will have the same problem soon.
Some far-right commentators say France is in a “pre-civil war” situation. Exaggerated yes but worth the thinking yes. France doesn’t have armed groups. The judges still control the government. And when the state is ready, the police can keep order. But the fact that some people use the phrase, it’s understandable. Left and right don’t just disagree anymore, they hate each other. In February in Lyon, a nationalist activist called Quentin Deranque was beaten to death after a fight between far-left and far-right militants. We don’t need a war to stop being able to disagree with each other in healthy society.
Back to the shooting. On October 23 a man of 39 opened fire in Trappes and La Verrière. He killed Pengo Bossio Wangi, who was 26, and hurt seven other people, one of them a young girl. Le Monde reports that he told investigators he wanted to “avenge” the shopkeepers whose shops were looted on October 17. The national antiterrorism prosecutor says he admitted he picked people he saw as Muslim, African or North African, and that he called Trappes “a den of Islamists.” He is charged with terrorist murder and attempted murder aggravated by racism, and he is in pretrial detention. Why he did it and what was in his head, the court will decide.
The looters have to go to court too, for what they did themselves. But this man took what they did and put it on millions of people he decided were “the same.” Pengo Bossio Wangi didn’t loot anything. The little girl didn’t either.
We can and should debate immigration, integration, Islam and security. That’s normal in a democracy. But blaming a whole group for what a few people did is something else, and when times are hard people do it more easily. The law has to protect a Muslim family in Trappes exactly like it protects anyone else in France. That is the basic rule of the republic, not a favour.
Nevertheless, saying this is not enough. People start blaming whole groups when they think the state will never fix anything. And French governments, like many in Europe, often wait too long on the hardest deep rooted problems. In some neighbourhoods drug networks are in charge and the people who live there suffer first. Integration policy doesn’t say clearly what it expects from people, and it doesn’t do what it promises. On October 17, the interior minister himself said they didn’t see it coming. If you never decide anything difficult, the anger stays there and grows, and at some point it finds someone to blame. Blaming whole communities is not the answer. The state has to apply the law the same way in every neighbourhood, rich or poor. Then saying clearly what it expects on integration, and actually doing what it promised. Then guilt stays with the person who did the crime.
The kids in Créteil, like most young people in France, live a lot online, and online anger spreads faster than understanding. Still, what they worry about is real. About one young person in five who is looking for work in France can’t find a job. AI is changing first jobs: some disappear, some new ones appear for people who can adapt fast. I think most of them are more scared of it than excited.
When young people believe that working hard will change their life, they study, they take risks, they start things. When getting your own flat or a stable job looks impossible, that hope turns into anger. How can we ask them to believe in a future, if we didn’t make that future believable.
But protesting alone won’t build that future. Not that protest is unnecessary. Looking back, from the Revolution to May 1968, protest in Europe won rights that everyone accepts today, and the right to demonstrate must stay. In 2018 the gilets jaunes, the “yellow vests,” protested against a fuel tax and got billions in emergency measures. After, the protests stopped but people still didn’t trust the government, and a lot of them took one lesson from it: if you push hard enough, you get money. This year’s high school students, who had fair demands, learned the same thing. I can understand them. But being against something is not the same as building something.
And the government giving in every time doesn’t work either. We saw it in 1995 with pensions, in 2006 with a youth job contract, and last year when they suspended the pension reform to keep support in parliament. The new measures, max 28 pupils per class and 15,000 more university places, are not nothing. Compromise is fine. What I don’t like is when they give a concession and then never do the reform. A concession gives you a few calm months. A reform deals with why people were angry in the first place. But a minority government with a presidential election in six months will usually wait. And because France is so centralised, every complaint goes straight to Paris. Meanwhile French pupils were last in the EU in fourth-grade maths in the latest TIMSS survey. So what is being done to give them skills that lead to a job?
Indeed, some Europeans expect the system to give them a lot and never ask who pays for it. You can have a right to something and still not get it. Equal opportunity is a fair thing to ask for. But you still have to work for years to succeed, nobody does it for you. We want social protection, and that’s normal, but somebody works and pays taxes for it. In some places, the culture of effort and taking initiative has become weaker and dimmer by the time. We talk about rights all day and almost never about what we give back. Then even fair complaints start to sound like “you owe me”. While President John F. Kennedy’s famous quote said, “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country,” it is no wonder that the growing gap between France and the United States starts with their very different ideologies and mindsets.
This is not an attack on Gen Z. Many young Europeans work hard in jobs that are not secure. And the older generations, especially the boomers, have huge responsibilities too. Suspending the pension reform mostly helped people born in 1964, the last boomers, and it costs almost €2 billion per year to a pension system that is already in deficit. Politicians who do that are not well placed to tell teenagers to make more effort. Yes, the obstacles are real. You can still do something about your own life. With an economy that is stuck, you have to work even harder, not less. Promises are not enough for young people, they need actual jobs and internships. They also need things school doesn’t teach well: how money works, how to get up after you fail, how to change direction. The goal is not to make them accept a bad situation. It’s to help them change it. And here France has not done enough.
The strange thing is that the people who lost on October 17 are not enemies. The shopkeeper whose shop was looted, the student who can’t find a first job, the taxpayer who pays for the repairs, the government that has trouble paying for schools: they all lost. The first estimates say the damage from October 17 and 18 is up to €1.1 billion, mostly for around 2,500 businesses and public buildings like the town hall in Limoges, and that doesn’t include police costs. Insurance should pay about three quarters. And then it starts again. Companies already pay high taxes, deal with a lot of rules, and since Russia invaded Ukraine they pay much more for energy than in the US, so they invest less. So no growth, so not many new jobs, so more angry people. Politics gets more divided and the reforms that could stop this never pass.
France does not spend too little; that is not the issue. Last year, public spending amounted to 57 percent of GDP, one of the highest levels in the developed world. And that is not even to mention the partial unemployment benefits that will be made available to businesses affected by the unrest. Still, the deficit should go up to 5.4 percent of GDP this year, and in October the ten-year borrowing rate went over 5 percent for the first time since 2002. We’ve had four prime ministers since January 2024 and there is no stable majority, so every difficult reform waits until a crisis forces it. France can’t keep a big social model and at the same time neglect the people who work, the people who create companies, and everything the economy and institutions are built on.
And it’s not only France. In Turin, students marched with the slogan “Faites comme en France” (“Do as France did”). On Saturday young Germans protested in about thirty cities against cuts in social spending and the return of military service. There were housing protests in Madrid and Lisbon, and Belgian unions went on strike about pensions. These movements are not organised together and they don’t ask for the same things. But I see the same fear behind them: that the promise Europe made after the war (you work, you buy a home, you get a pension, your kids have a better life than you) is slowly breaking while competition gets harder. According to Stanford, AI investment in the US was about $286 billion last year, and in all of Europe about $21 billion. Mario Draghi already warned that Europe is behind the US in productivity and behind both of its big rivals in key technologies. If Europe stops innovating, investing and creating companies, it will lose its influence, the money to pay for its social model, and the chances it owes to young people. Americans should pay attention too. The US and the EU are the biggest economic partnership in the world, and a weak, divided Europe would be a weaker ally and good news for everyone who says democracies don’t work anymore.
None of this has to happen. France’s social model is a real achievement and worth protecting. But a social contract doesn’t survive just because our grandparents fought for it. Each generation has to pay for it, improve it and renew it. So who owes what? The government should give people real chances and apply the rules the same way to everyone. It should also tell the truth about what the country can pay for. Older people owe young people solid institutions and a future, not just debt. Companies, schools and associations can offer apprenticeships, mentoring and first jobs without waiting for Paris to tell them. And young people owe it to themselves to work, adapt, try new things and build. Solidarity without the money to pay for it is an empty promise. Asking people to be responsible without giving them real chances is empty too.
France rebuilt Notre-Dame, and Limoges will get its town hall back. What is harder to rebuild is people’s hope: the belief that scholarships should be awarded based on merit, not merely social or economic status; that those who receive them are genuinely committed to their studies and show up in class; that hard work will take you somewhere; and that those who work and contribute should be able to earn a better living than those who rely on social support. It is also about believing that the law protects you, whoever you are, and that there is still a future here worth working for.
There is still hope that Europe can become a place where talent thrives, and begin to offer something like a European Dream, a French Dream. At this moment, perhaps it is only a dream. But hope can be born again when we create a place where people feel safe enough to dream, and where they can believe that those dreams are worth pursuing.
