Are student protests being manipulated ahead of France's presidential election?France's prime minister has suggested that student anger is being weaponised, as the unions and other protesters prepare to take to the streets too.16 mins agoEurope

The French passion for protest is legendary in Europe.

Over the last few years, we have regularly witnessed farmers angry about costly regulations lobbing manure at local mayoral offices, while masked youths periodically hurl homemade grenades at riot police in disadvantaged city suburbs.

For over three weeks now, thousands of students have barricaded entry to high schools and taken their grievances to the streets.

This Saturday, hundreds of new demonstrations have been announced across France.

France’s prime minister, Sébastien Lecornu, suggested this week that student anger was being manipulated as politics heats up ahead of next year’s presidential election.

The gilets jaunes (yellow vests) demonstrated against cost-of-living hikes for over a year from 2018 – becoming one of the longest-lived protest movements in French history.

Jérôme Rodrigues, a prominent gilets jaunes activist, has used Instagram to encourage people to join Saturday’s demonstrations.

The protests should give a voice to those who “want to be able to live decently, no longer have to count every cent, and no longer have to choose between eating and driving”, he said in a video.

“Anger has no political party. An empty fridge has no political party,” he added.

So what is going on in the EU’s second largest economy?

Social unrest, government borrowing costs at eye-watering highs, a deeply divided French parliament and an apparent revolving door of exasperated French prime ministers – six prime ministers over the last five years – all claiming to want to reduce their country’s public debt.

Is France at breaking-point – and what does this all mean for the eurozone currency the French are such a huge part of?

“You can’t compare France to the Greece debt crisis of 2012 or Argentina in 2001. And the financial markets know it,” economist Anne-Laure Delatte told me.

She is a CNRS Tenured Researcher at the Economics Department of Paris Dauphine University; a well-known face in debates on French media on the parlous state of the country’s public debt.

“The markets recognised already in 2024 that we would have a budgetary problem after [snap] elections left parliament deeply divided between three [opposing political] blocs but they also realise France is a big country with the ability to raise taxes if necessary.”

“Our situation is more like the UK in 2023 with Liz Truss,” suggests Delatte, referring to the then UK prime minister’s so-called mini budget, which triggered a sharp drop in the pound, a spike in government bond yields and soaring mortgage rates.

“The crisis was relatively short-lived because the markets recognised the UK had the financial tools to right itself.”

“Here in France it would be painful, but a 4% increase in VAT would raise the 120bn euros needed to plug government debt. Investors know that,” she concludes.

Maybe, in theory. And, as Delatte also points out, the European Central Bank would likely intervene if France’s finances nosedived to the point where other European economies would be affected.

But with so many French citizens already visibly unhappy with the status quo, imagine the reaction if taxes were to increase, or welfare and education budgets decrease, further.

France’s national motto is liberté, égalité, fraternité (freedom, equality and fraternity), but that is certainly not the sense you get on seething streets and in viral social media posts.

I met 17-year-olds Maxime, Madeleine and Elodie this week, perched on big green dustbins that have been used to block the entrance to their high school as part of the weeks’ long protest.

They told me things were bad enough here, in the 3rd district of Paris, with holes in classroom walls, swelling class sizes and a dearth of teaching staff, but the teenagers were more than aware, they said, that the situation was far worse in their capital city’s disadvantaged suburbs.

“France likes to speak of égalité,” they told me “but the reality is the poor here are prejudiced against, while the rich benefit.”

None of them will be old enough to vote in the presidential election in France next spring but they questioned whether the changing face of politicians in power made all that much difference anyway.

The three young women told me large-scale protests seemed the only way to get heard by French authorities.

They are part of a defiant French tradition.

Cultural icon Victor Hugo, the 19th-Century author of French Revolution classic Les Misérables, also an activist for the French Republic, proclaimed: “Si vous n’êtes pas contents, manifestez, criez, hurlez, mais ne subissez pas.”

(“If you are not happy, protest, shout, scream but do not give up and give in.”)

Amongst crowds of protesting students walking through Paris on Thursday, I came across a number of mums, with placards around their necks, reading: “Mums in solidarity.”

Were they there to protest or to protect their kids, I asked? “Both!” was the emphatic response.

Gwen, 37, said she and other mothers were taking it in turns every morning to co-ordinate between students and police at their local school lock-in.

This came after mounting accusations of police brutality, denied by France’s interior ministry, during protests earlier this month in which hundreds were injured and a 15-year-old boy in the town of Lens lost a hand.

France’s interior minister has since suspended the use of stun grenades by police at high school demonstrations.

Gwen told me she did not mind that her son was missing weeks of school as a result of the lock-ins. “It’s a far better education for him to wake up to his civic duty and to fight for what is just in society,” she said.

At Thursday’s demo I also came across 17-year-old Lola and her mother, Sandrine, sharing a placard that said revolution was the most beautiful expression of humanity.

“My mum took to the streets in ’68,” Lola said proudly. “Now it’s my turn. No point in waiting for the presidential election in France. We want change now.”

Student protests in Paris in May 1968 are the stuff of legend in France. Demands for better education inspired workers to join the marches which turned into the ­biggest general strike in French ­history. It set the standard for revolutionary upheaval for a generation and is credited with creating new opportunities for the French left.

Now, though, with six months to go before an already fraught presidential election in France, there are accusations that the hard left, under presidential hopeful Jean-Luc Mélenchon, is weaponising student frustration.

“Members of [Mélenchon’s] France Insoumise (LFI) are instrumentalising the high school movement for their electoral advantage,” said Sébastien Lecornu on Wednesday. He accused them of encouraging protests, then going through the motions of condemning any violence.

“This hypocrisy damages France,” said Lecornu.

But “Mélenchon for President!” is a chant you often hear amongst the students in the streets.

Supporters applaud his desire for a wealth tax in France, for lowering the voting age to 16 and for being the only presidential candidate to turn up to French schools to examine the state of them, several demonstrators told me.

For Marine Le Pen, the nationalist anti-immigration favourite in France’s presidential race, the solution is cutting the country’s €11bn contribution to the EU’s budget.

There is, though, reason to doubt that any new French president, from the left or the right, will be able to break the impasse over France’s finances.

France is far from alone in Europe right now faced with an ageing population, a generous welfare state to run and a national economy squeezed by outside pressures such as US President Donald Trump’s trade tariffs and the war in the Persian Gulf.

Whether in France, Germany, Sweden or Italy, there is an inherent tension between politicians who hesitate to tell voters the truth about shrinking public finances, the defence establishment’s demand for higher defence spending and citizens’ insistence on improved public services.

In France, that pressure is particularly acute. French public expenditure, at about 57% GDP, is one of the steepest amongst wealthy nations worldwide.

Social spending, particularly on pensions, is exceptionally large, while French citizens pay one of the highest overall tax and social contribution burdens in Europe. Simply put, they expect a welfare and public service bang for their buck.

But economist Anne-Laure Delatte does not believe having a new president will ease her country’s financial migraine.

“We need constitutional change. A new system. A new Republic,” she told me.

“Our Fifth Republic is centred around a powerful president. Parliament is there to block him or her rather than to find consensus or to make new laws.”

For France to progress, she says, that has to change.

The French parliamentary election that follows the 2027 presidential vote is likely to be as divided as ever, she believes: “We need a system where MPs have more power and should learn consensus and coalition-building from our European neighbours.”

In her opinion, education had to be protected and funds better distributed. It was an investment in France’s financial future, she told me.

“Our current system of inequality in schooling and low wages for teachers means we lose out from benefiting from the best and brightest across French society. That is not only unfair on individuals but our economy ultimately loses out on innovation and productivity.”

Re-writing France’s constitution is not on the cards, at the moment. So, what about the here and now, I asked centrist politician Anne-Catherine Loisier.

She’s a senator for the Centrist Union in France’s upper house of parliament and vice president of the parliamentary group for sciences and technology.

“Our budgets are limited,” she admitted, “but you don’t necessarily need more money. You can make improvements by redistributing funding better. Education is a regional competence in France. Every region should take a look at local needs and address priorities accordingly. That action can be taken immediately.”

I asked Loisier if she agreed with UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham, the former mayor of Greater Manchester, that regions should be given greater powers. “Absolutely,” she replied. “France has traditionally been very Paris-centric but so much could be improved by decentralising the country.”

“My France isn’t broken. I don’t recognise that image you see portrayed in the media. My country is made up of lots of Frances. Paris, the regions; northern and southern France. We need to give power back to the people. Local governments can look people in the eye directly, so voters feel they have power over their own future, rather than politicians handing them their fate from up high in Paris.”

“That way I hope we can restore voters’ – and students’ – faith in politics.”

It’s a promise you hear from politicians – right and left – ahead of France’s huge elections next year.

But opinion polls here, as across most of Europe, indicate public faith in the political class is in dwindling supply.