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The Specter of Lepenism Looms Over France’s Social Crisis

Joining forces with the “yellow vests,” youth demonstrators are raising the alarm in a country falling to the far right.

Student demonstrators in France gained a second wind this weekend, joining cost-of-living demonstrations on Saturday in a significant escalation of the country’s social crisis. Thoroughfares in French cities large and small, from Paris to Limoges, were filled with as many as 800,000 people, according to organizers.

State intelligence services underestimated the level of participation, as impromptu marches crisscrossing city centers were able to overwhelm police forces. There were more than 2,000 arrests reported across the country over hours of heated clashes that saw the burning of public buildings and the ransacking of private businesses like luxury retail stores in Paris and Bordeaux. Though the vast majority of protesters were peaceful, some violent demonstrators did engage in acts of vandalism, like the burning of the neo-Renaissance city hall building in Limoges. As of Sunday, 500 people were still in police custody in the capital alone.

“How can French people do this to France?” said President Emmanuel Macron on Sunday evening, responding to the weekend’s rioting in a televised address. Blaming “ultra-left groupings” and “delinquents,” the president offered little in the way of major policy announcements, indicating instead that police prefects would be encouraged to consider strict protest bans.

The convergence between students and this weekend’s marches was not surprising. A segregated, underfunded education system is only one of the many grievances bringing French high school and university students out in force. From artificial intelligence and climate change to diminishing expectations over an uncertain future, they are calling attention to many of the demands heard in youth-led movements like Spain’s recent housing protests, anti-conscription demonstrations in Germany, and India’s so-called “cockroach” movement.

For many, it’s also a political coming of age.

The impasse is only exacerbated by growing fears over the trajectory of French politics, which after a decade under President Emmanuel Macron has seen the far right make considerable gains in both institutional and cultural power. Going from vocal outsiders to insider kingmakers, Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National is in many respects already setting the agenda when it comes to immigration, Islam, and the demonization of progressives. The imminent risk today is the all-too-possible scenario of a far-right victory in the spring 2027 presidential elections.

To some, it’s a sign of the movement’s hijacking by the left: Many students have made no mystery of their fears of where the normalization of Le Pen is taking the country they’re inheriting.

“The ideas of the far right are becoming mainstream while those who denounce the country’s slide into fascism are being discredited,” Soumaya Sarré told The Nation. Sarré is the spokesperson for the Fédération Lycéenne des Quartiers, a collective established in Saint-Denis in early October that seeks to represent the specific needs of students in the working-class and ethnically diverse banlieues.

Saturday’s marches were again filled with protesters chanting antifascist slogans and carrying banners denouncing the rise of the far right. The chorus from a 1985 punk anthem, “Porcherie”........

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