A substantial fraction of the ground troops in the French street riots are genuine students, not just members of the Red-Green alliance.
Sure, in the great Venn Diagram of life, there is a lot of overlap in the three groups, but there is actually a grain, or more than a grain, of truth in the complaints that young people are making about the economy of France, the state of public education, and their poor prospects for having a life as good as or better than their parents'.
Several things can be true at once: that the riots are being promoted or instigated by outside forces in the Communist/Islamist alliance, that the students have some genuine gripes that in a better world would be taken seriously and addressed, and that the "solutions" the students and their allies would only make things worse.
Welcome to reality, where there are black, white, and many shades of gray. And, in this case, lots of orange and yellow from all the crap burning in the streets.
Young Europeans are taking to the streets in Paris, Madrid, and Brussels. They say they want more investment in schools and housing. They should be protesting a system rigged for their grandparents. https://t.co/EbK3WcxlBk
— The Free Press (@TheFP) October 12, 2026
If you have been following my writing (and my colleagues'), you know that we have been following the riots from the very beginning. Not because they are timely, but because what is happening in France and across the European continent indicates, and in some cases previews, conflicts and problems we face here at home.
It's fun to point at France and make fun of their propensity to riot at the drop of a hat, or shake our heads at the civilizational suicide of mass migration, and wonder at the disaster that it's regulatory states and the EU regime have created, but we are just a few years behind them in many of these regards.
We would probably be much closer, but for Trump's fighting back against the transnationalists.
The protests themselves would probably have burned out already (yes, pun intended) because riots tend to be cathartic, and even when the sense of grievance remains, a well-functioning state can generally suppress riots when they go on day after day. There may be flare-ups for a while, but relentless pressure usually comes from outside agitators — in this case, the Red-Green alliance. I wrote about that earlier, so I won't rehash the evidence here.
Underneath the riots, though, are the genuine gripes, and as Niall Ferguson points out, none of the rioters seem to understand why things have gone so far off the rails in Europe in general, and France in particular.
But the reasons are pretty obvious, if you look at the situation clearly, as almost nobody does. And why people don't is that the reasons are uncomfortable to look at. The French welfare state is incredibly generous, unsustainable, and stacked against the people who are going to be working for decades to prop up a failing system. Even mass migration is driven by the fact that the birth rate is so low that without new workers to keep that welfare state going, the system is on the verge of collapse.
The fact that young people are setting wheelie bins on fire is in some ways a distraction from the root causes of all this political instability. For, despite the echoes of 1789, 1830, 1848, 1871, and 1968, when youthful revolutionaries challenged Europe’s established order, the generational politics of 2026 is very different. Today, by historical standards, the young are an endangered species. They are dimly aware that they are being screwed, but they don’t appear to understand who’s doing the screwing.
A clue for the European young: It’s not Donald Trump or Benjamin Netanyahu or whoever else you want to burn in effigy. Mais, non: It’s your grandparents.
Hint: don't follow the advice of the Left and burn anything at all, and most certainly not your grandparents.
Niall has a point. The French love their time off, their early retirement, their generous welfare state, and to look down their noses at Americans who work like draft horses, but the fact is that with all our ridiculous fraud and financial instability, America is far more productive than Europe, and that the recompense for work is much greater here.
America may look like a gerontocracy, and in many ways it is, but compared to France, we are positively vital, and our economy is much sounder. In a bizarre way, even during the flaccid Biden years, Potatus was right to say that, compared to our peers, we were an economic giant. Not because we were humming along well, but because they were much worse off.
As is well known, Europe has relatively generous welfare systems, which do more taxing and redistributing than their U.S. equivalents. It’s just that these systems were designed for 2.5 children per family and an average life expectancy of 62, not 1.25 and 79. With a few exceptions, the various European models are in the early phase of a nosedive into insolvency.
To be sure, aging isn’t the sole driver of rising public debt. It explains about two-fifths of the increase since 2000. The rest is due to debt-financed spending in response to the financial crisis, Covid-19, and other crises; tax cuts and discretionary spending; and the rising cost of paying interest on the debt. And the aging problem varies from country to country. No European country is aging as fast, nor reducing fertility as much, as Japan and South Korea.
This aging trend is not about to stop. Across the OECD, the dependency ratio is forecast to rise from 32.6 seniors per 100 people of working age in 2024 to 55.2 in 2054—a 69 percent increase. The working-age population will decline by 13 percent over the next four decades across the OECD. (In Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland the decline will exceed 35 percent.)
This is not primarily a problem of public pensions—the original government welfare program, introduced by the German chancellor Otto von Bismarck in 1889. The OECD’s latest projections have average public pension spending rising from 8.8 percent of GDP in 2023–2024 to 10 percent in 2050—not a crippling increase. This is because most countries (not all) have acted in various ways to cap the costs of public pensions, either by reducing benefits, restricting coverage, or raising retirement ages.
The real problem is the cost of elderly healthcare. The European Commission’s 2024 Ageing Report estimated that total age-related expenditure—pensions, healthcare, long-term care, and some other age-related items—would rise by about 1.2 percentage points of GDP between 2022 and 2070 in its baseline scenario, reaching 25.6 percent of GDP by 2070. However, under less rosy assumptions about healthcare and long-term care, the increase could be three times higher (roughly 3.9 percentage points).
In essence, politicians on both sides of the English Channel have gotten into the very bad habit of bribing seniors based on the observation that they are increasingly numerous and have relatively high turnout rates in elections. Spending on the over-65s has risen in Britain by 2.5 percentage points of GDP since 2000; the French figure is close to 3 percent. In both France and Britain, median incomes, adjusted for inflation, have risen almost half as much again for over-64s as for 18 to 64s. In other words, it has paid better in both countries to be retired than to be employed.
Compounding these financial problems is the fact that youth unemployment is remarkably high compared to the United States, and I suspect the problem will get worse, not better, as American men shift from college education to trades that are actually productive.
And unlike Europe, except for groups like Muslims, integration works relatively well here, and if we squeeze welfare fraud out of the system as much as possible, productivity growth will remain much higher here than over there. American youth, despite all their flaws, still tend to expect to work for a living, and that expectation will likely grow if we can move more kids off the higher-ed track and into productive jobs with good pay.
Unfortunately, the French Fifth Republic is ill-equipped to meet the challenge. The vocabulary of European politics rules out the sentence: “We need to reform seniors’ entitlements so that we don’t go bankrupt.” Instead, the left offers socialism and the right serves up national socialism. The left lays the blame on billionaires, whom they will tax to pay for yet more benefits. The right lays the blame on immigrants, whom they will deport as if that will help matters. Apart from that difference, there is a horseshoe forming in Western politics: At the extremes, socialism and national socialism are converging on economic issues (industrial policy, public ownership, rent controls), not to mention foreign policy (blame Israel for everything). Of course, these tired old ideas bear almost no relation to economic reality.
So what happens? I think young Europeans have been so successfully indoctrinated in school and college that they’ll blame almost anyone for their dissatisfaction, except the people who are actually responsible: namely seniors and the politicians who rely on their votes. So instead of voting for (if such a thing existed) a European version of Argentina’s Javier Milei—who campaigned for radical fiscal reform precisely to create better opportunities for the young—they’ll try the old, been-there-done-that solutions, and the results will be a weaker euro, more inflation, downgrades by the rating agencies, and even higher interest rates.
As a result, despite their fine pledges to spend more on national security, few European governments will modernize their air defenses in the way they clearly need to as the Russian drone menace extends beyond Ukraine. A shocking amount of European defense spending goes to—you guessed it—the pensions of retired military personnel.
Unfortunately for France, the "right wing" alternative to the transnationalists is not Javier Milei, but Marine Le Pen. American conservatives see in her a kindred spirit because she, too, is a nationalist, but we tend to miss that she is also a socialist who has promised a MORE generous welfare state for the elderly and non-elderly, with retirement ages as low as 60 for people who started work before age 20.
That won't work, and it is a horrendous idea. It will just mean that a bunch of still-relatively-vital Parisians will sit at cafés, drinking cappuccinos and eating croissants as they watch their cities burn, and Muslims harassing French girls for not wearing hijabs.
Today's situation is the product of massive mistakes made in an earlier age: depopulation agendas, the expansion of welfare states, early retirement, mass migration, and a regulatory state that has strangled productivity.
The youth on the streets feel the effects, but their diagnosis of the problem is 180 degrees off from reality. They don't need more money spent by the state; what they need is a president wielding a chainsaw and a Parliament ready to help him chop the welfare state down.
Is there any chance such a political movement will rise? Well, anything is possible, but I would put the likelihood as asymptotically approaching zero. It is much easier to sell people a future of free everything and unlimited leisure time than a few years of fiscal austerity, fewer vacation days, and fewer retirement years than their parents and grandparents had.
That way lies a better, happier future once the adjustments are made, but that's like telling a fat person that a couple of hours in the gym would make them much healthier and happier. A few people will take the lesson to heart, but more of them will join a fat liberation movement to express their outrage at being disadvantaged by their adipose tissue.
Especially when people are egging them on to do so. Sure, you can be "healthy at any size!" Fat liberation!
Is there a European Javier Milei? Frankly, I don't know. It seems unlikely, but stranger things have happened. Argentina was an economic mess for decades.
More likely, though, is a future of economic decline, hopefully with fewer, not more riots.
Editor's Note: The Democrat Party has been infected by socialism, and it's spreading FAST. Democrats are claiming there's nothing to worry about, but we know the truth.
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