Photograph by Michael Leonardi

Demonstrations began on September 17 at the Lycée Saint-Exupéry in Créteil, a largely working-class suburb southeast of Paris. High school students and teachers blocked the gates over inadequate staffing, overcrowded classrooms, and deteriorating buildings. The school gave them some of what they asked for. The strike ended. The anger didn’t.

Word of the unrest spread rapidly on social media. University students joined in solidarity and the strikes spread, raising broader concerns about cuts to public education. Labor unions followed, bringing the cost-of-living crisis into the frame and turning a local school action into a national movement. Within weeks, hundreds of schools across France were blocked.

On October 17, the Interior Ministry counted roughly 550,000 people in the streets against the cost of living and a government that had nothing to offer. Most of the marches stayed peaceful. After dark, Paris, Marseille, Lyon, Limoges, Bordeaux, and Lille burned. Masked groups joined the demonstrations, clashing with police, setting fires, looting shops, and attacking public buildings. In Limoges the historic 19th-century town hall was set ablaze. Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu said 1,200 people were arrested and 150 officers injured. A 15-year-old lost part of his hand, possibly to a stun grenade. Curfews went up.

France’s Justice Ministry reported more than 6,877 arrests by October 9th, 86 percent of them involving minors. Macron blamed far-left groups and criminals, while a government spokesperson said the students’ grievances were legitimate but were being exploited and transformed into urban violence. On October 7th the government proposed a five-point plan focused on filling teacher vacancies, repairing school buildings, improving students’ daily schedules, clarifying university admissions, and giving students a greater voice in school decisions. The CGT called strikes for November 5th. Yellow Vest organizers called another march for October 24th. The echoes of the 2018 yellow vest movement are clear. France started it. The rest of the continent is following.

Governments that cannot staff a school or keep the lights on in a hospital can still find the money for weapons, for police in the streets, and for a temporary rebate that gets the trucks moving until the next crisis. The rebate is not a solution. It is the admission that the skyrocketing prices of energy, housing, and food will not be touched. The energy giants have already booked record profits on the diesel that emptied the shelves. The military contractors have already booked the orders locked into the rearmament budgets for the war in Ukraine and the widening confrontation with Iran. NATO’s drive to raise military spending runs on the same books that leave the classrooms underfunded, healthcare systems in shambles, and the wages stagnant.

The war on Iran, and the disruption in the Strait of Hormuz that followed, is one of the principal drivers of the fuel prices now emptying the shelves. The war in Ukraine continues to justify the rearmament budgets that starve the schools and hospitals. People are connecting both wars — the Strait and the eastern front — to the underfunded classroom, the stagnant wage, and the family that can no longer make ends meet.

Italy is already in it. On October 10th, a day of global action for Palestine brought hundreds of thousands into the streets in over 80 cities and towns across Italy, including Rome, Turin, Milan, Florence, and Naples. In Rome the march left the Colosseum under banners calling for “The end of genocide and the end of Zionism” and remembering “October 7th: Day of Resistance.” USB, Potere al Popolo, student groups, and grassroots citizens groups were there. In Turin tens of thousands walked behind giant cardboard heads of Trump and Netanyahu, symbolically put on trial, pelted with tomatoes and rocks, stomped and eventually burned. One organizer said the point was to put the genocide back in the headlines.

The same governments funding NATO’s rearmament for Ukraine and complicit in the silence around Gaza now face masses of students carrying Palestinian flags and drivers who can empty the shelves. Israel’s impunity is written into the same budgets that leave the schools leaking and the diesel unaffordable, while the war on Iran helps set the price of that diesel.

Photograph........

© CounterPunch