Europe’s dangerous winter of discontent

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Europe’s dangerous winter of discontent

Ahead of major elections in Spain, France, Greece and Italy, a plethora of crises is hammering the continent.

By MARION SOLLETTY,
AITOR HERNÁNDEZ-MORALES,
MARTINA SAPIO and ALICE TAYLOR in Paris

^{Illustration by Arnau Busquets Guàrdia/POLITICO}

Europe is angry.

Rents are soaring. Energy prices are rising, fueling pain at the pump and inflation. Growth is stagnating. And borrowing costs are climbing in France, Italy, Spain and Greece, meaning cash that could have been used to rebuild schools, subsidize housing or compensate drought-stricken farmers must now go toward repaying creditors.

The societal consequences of this spiraling cost-of-living crisis are already surfacing, from rioting and looting in France on the sidelines of peaceful protests to blocked supply chains in Italy and giant campouts in historic Spanish plazas. Authorities in Paris and Rome are deploying extra security forces to prevent similar scenes from playing out in the coming days.

But fixing the underlying issues driving people to the streets appears to be difficult for Europe’s cash-strapped governments.

“No other generation has known, over the past 50 years, as many challenges,” said French Green MP Pouria Amirshahi, one of the co-chairs of a newly formed parliamentary committee tasked with investigating to what extent the government mishandled Saturday’s protest.

With temperatures plunging and the energy crisis showing no signs of easing, a European winter of discontent is hovering on the horizon — while major elections, some featuring confident nationalist-populist parties, loom across the continent.

Continental discontent

The situation in France — where on Saturday, students who had been blockading schools for weeks to pressure the government to better fund education joined forces with hundreds of thousands of people protesting the rising cost of living — is particularly concerning for the EU’s overall stability given the country is the bloc’s second-largest economy.

But it’s not unique.

“In terms of cost of living, the situation in France is not so much different from the rest of Europe,” said German economist Carsten Brzeski, ING’s global head of macro research.

The eviction of an 87-year-old pensioner from her home in Madrid last month triggered demonstrations across Spain over rental protections and housing prices, which between 2015 and 2025 rose by 80% while salaries increased by only 30%. Protesters in Portugal, where house prices have nearly tripled since 2015, driven up by tourist demand and digital nomads, followed suit.

Albanians have been peacefully protesting since May against alleged widespread government corruption and a proposed luxury resort linked to U.S. President Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner. But the situation turned violent last week when students entered the fray, airing grievances including poverty and the cost of living, a lack of investment in education and health — and calling for the entire political class to resign.

Thousands of students and teachers took to the streets on Wednesday in Athens and around 50 other Greek cities, demanding more state funding for education, safe school buildings and affordable housing. Serbian students are out in force as well, turning the largest protests the country has ever seen into de facto political rallies ahead of parliamentary elections on Sunday.

Youth movements have also called for protests in Germany, where small-scale gatherings over educational funding cuts have already taken place in Berlin and Hanover.

Over the weekend, students marched in several northern Italian cities to protest low wages and the cost of living. Flashes of violence, similar to those in France and Albania, were seen as well, with masked groups looting stores, throwing stones at police and setting fire to street furniture. Italian public broadcaster RAI, citing a police report, put the number of protesters at around 10,000 across several cities.

Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and her government responded by enacting stringent new security measures, including sending 500 troops “to defend” Milan.

“Demonstrating is a right, devastating our cities is not,” Meloni said.

Marie Hyland, a researcher at Eurofound, the EU’s agency for improving living and working conditions, said the cost-of-living crisis was “undermining” the social contract between generations, as young Europeans face the prospect of falling short of their “implicit expectation” of being as prosperous as their parents.

Amirshahi, the French MP, is among the growing number of his government’s critics who accuse ministers of letting things get out of control by failing to engage with the student movement early on, noting that it took weeks for the French education minister to meet with student protest leaders.

“The initial demands were very simple and practical. Toilet paper in restrooms; ceilings that hold together, having teachers,” he said.

Amirshahi, who took part in last weekend’s protests in his Paris constituency, said “all European democracies should watch with vigilance” what’s happening in the country as it faces what he described as an attempt to crush popular revolt by force.

“The situation in France is on edge,” he said.

Online contamination, real-life concern

Social media has played a key role in the growth of protests and the deeply polarized political debate surrounding them. According to social monitoring platform Visibrain, more than 2.2 million tweets about the protests were posted Saturday, three times the number of messages shared during the peak of the Yellow Vests crisis in late 2018.

The French government summoned key platforms Tuesday to discuss the proliferation of content seen as glorifying street violence after live footage of looting and rioting was shared on video platforms such as TikTok.

Online activism also helped movements spread across borders. In the Italian city of Bologna, protesters chanted viral slogans heard during French high school protests. Instagram pages have picked up France’s call for a new protest on Saturday, while Telegram groups keep members updated on the political situation in both countries. In Albania, some protesters said their counterparts in Spain had sent them money for supplies like masks and purified water to fend off the effects of tear gas.

On the airwaves, far-right parties in France, Spain and Portugal have moved to capitalize on the anger on the streets by blaming traditional, centrist political forces for failing to address ordinary citizens’ needs.

French presidential candidate Marine Le Pen, the 2027 election front-runner, is trying to convince voters that she and her far-right National Rally party are the only political force that can restore law and order. Jorge Martín Frías, an MEP from Spain’s far-right Vox party, argued that Europe’s mainstream politicians had “committed the sin of pride and forgotten the common people.”

The French government and right-wing politicians have accused far-left presidential candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon, an early supporter of student protests, of fueling the unrest to his political advantage. Mélenchon strenuously denies the allegations — as do some of his adversaries — and the first post-riot presidential poll showed little change in voter intentions.

In any case, Italy’s situation, where the right-wing Meloni faces youth protests in the north and truckers and farmers block motorway exits over fuel prices in the south, shows leaders across the political spectrum are facing similar issues.

In Spain, most surveys have the conservative People’s Party on track to win enough seats to form a coalition government with far-right Vox in the country’s upcoming snap elections, which Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez called after lawmakers rejected a long-delayed package of housing measures he put forward in response to the protests.

But Spaniards are likely to remain exasperated with politicians, according to Valeria Racu, spokesperson for the Madrid Tenants’ Union, which has helped spearhead the protest movement.

“Whoever governs, this is not going to stop,” after the November election, she said, arguing that the demonstrators had achieved more in a few weeks of protests than Sánchez’s left-wing government had in eight years in power.

Housing activists intend to drive that message home on Nov. 11, during Spain’s first general strike in 15 years.

“Politics is returning to where it always should have been: the streets and the people,” Racu said.

Eyes on Germany

All eyes are now on falling temperatures and rising energy prices, which are poised to weigh heavily on household budgets.

Phuc-Vinh Nguyen, head of the Energy Centre at the Jacques Delors Institute, said social movements were to be expected as the mechanisms put in place by governments to shield households from rising energy prices linked to the Iran war are expiring.

No country appears immune, with Germany appearing to be one of this winter’s most vulnerable.

“Germany is among the countries to watch because [its] gas reserves are at historically low levels,” Nguyen said.

That means German households are likely to see their heating bills hit hard by surging prices, and tensions in the gas market are also likely to ripple through electricity markets and neighboring countries, Nguyen said.

Brzeski, the German economist, agreed.

“There is an issue that is now voiced more loudly in France, but it is very similar to the situation in other European countries,” he said, pointing to a stagnating economy and affordability issues.

“The biggest difference between France and Germany is that, at the moment, Germany has fiscally deeper pockets,” to soften the impact, Brzeski said. “But what is currently happening in France can easily happen in a couple of years from now in Germany.”

Aitor Hernández-Morales reported from Madrid and Alice Taylor reported from Tirana. Nektaria Stamouli contributed reporting from Athens and Una Hajdari contributed reporting from Belgrade.