Latest / Pollar Sounds / Why are Europe's young people in the streets?
Transcript
- 0:00Hi, and welcome to Pollar. This autumn,
- 0:02young people have taken to the streets across Europe,
- 0:05from Paris and Milan to Belgrade, Tirana, and Lisbon.
- 0:09In this episode, we try to work out why and whether any of it is working.
- 0:13And we talk to Donatella della Porta,
- 0:15professor of sociology at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Florence and founder of
- 0:20its Centre on Social Movement Studies.
- 0:22She spent her career studying protest movements.
- 0:25We hope you enjoy it.
- 0:36Imagine a minister who never sleeps, never takes a holiday, no family to favour,
- 0:41no personal ambitions, and nobody can bribe her.
- 0:45Sounds like a dream minister, to be honest.
- 0:47That's pretty much how she was sold. Her name means sun.
- 0:51She wears a traditional dress from the north of her country,
- 0:54and the day she was introduced to parliament,
- 0:56she gave a speech from two enormous screens.
- 0:59Because she isn't a person, she's a chatbot.
- 1:02She's called Diella, and her one job was to make sure nobody could ever cheat on a
- 1:06state contract again. She told MPs in the Albanian parliament,
- 1:10"The Constitution speaks of institutions at the people's service.
- 1:14It doesn't speak of chromosomes, of flesh or blood."
- 1:18Chromosomes. Okay, and then what?
- 1:21Well, hold on to that. Within months,
- 1:24prosecutors were investigating the agency that built her, though not over her,
- 1:28and a year later, protesters in Tirana were setting fire to government buildings
- 1:32around her.
- 1:34Meanwhile, in France, school pupils were organising blockades in group chats on
- 1:38Snapchat. Repeatedly, a stranger wanted to join, a user called Mamadou.
- 1:44And other accounts asked the same thing over and over, "When's the blockade?"
- 1:48In those messages, the same strange phrase, "Bismillah, c'est les ténèbres".
- 1:54Which roughly translates to, "In the name of God, it's the darkness."
- 1:58It doesn't really mean anything.
- 2:00Some pupils were convinced it was undercover police badly pretending to be one of
- 2:04them. The police haven't confirmed that,
- 2:06but the pupils turned it into their slogan,
- 2:08and it's reportedly turning up on placards in other countries too.
- 2:12And then there's Tirana. Students marched on the education ministry over fees,
- 2:16rundown dorms, and corruption.
- 2:20And what's the bigger worry?
- 2:22Leaving. Hundreds of thousands of young Albanians already have.
- 2:27Across much of Europe, protests have been erupting.
- 2:30Some have won something. Some have faced fierce resistance.
- 2:33Eight countries, one autumn. From Belgrade to Lisbon,
- 2:37young people on the streets, and one question, who actually answers for this?
- 2:43A quick word about Pollar. It's free to read with no ads and no data sales,
- 2:47and every story links to the reporting behind it.
- 2:50To help keep Pollar independent, become a member.
- 2:53Supporter from $2.99 a month adds listening, offline reading, and weekly deep dives.
- 2:58Founder adds a private community and a say in what comes next.
- 3:02Apart from our own interview,
- 3:03everything in this episode comes from published reporting,
- 3:06and where people disagree, we'll tell you what each side says.
- 3:10In this episode, we try to join the dots between this autumn's protests from a train
- 3:14station in Serbia to a group chat in Paris.
- 3:17We'll look at who's resisting hardest and how Serbia's students actually won.
- 3:21We'll go back to Albania and the minister who isn't there,
- 3:24and we'll ask Donatella della Porta,
- 3:26who has spent decades studying protest movements,
- 3:29why all of this is happening now and why not everywhere.
- 3:36Okay, so we've covered a lot of these protests on their own already.
- 3:40Madrid's housing camp, the French students, Tirana, Serbia on the ballot,
- 3:44but we've never really put them on one map.
- 3:47No, and when you do, the first thing you notice is that the dates line up in a
- 3:52really strange way. So take Saturday the 17th of October.
- 3:57France has its biggest day of marches yet.
- 3:59Italy has a cost-of-living march in Milan that turns into looting.
- 4:03Belgium has marches in Brussels and Liège.
- 4:06And that same day, housing activists pitch tents in the main square in Lisbon.
- 4:10Four countries, one Saturday.
- 4:12And on the 13th of October,
- 4:14students in Tirana gather outside their education ministry.
- 4:17On the very same day, students in Athens put up tents in Syntagma Square opposite
- 4:22the Greek parliament.
- 4:23Okay, let's just count them. France, Italy, Belgium, Portugal, Greece, Albania.
- 4:30Six countries in five days, and Spain and Serbia were already on the streets,
- 4:34so either it's a coincidence or something links them, and honestly,
- 4:38there are three ways people explain it.
- 4:41Theory one, copycats.
- 4:45Irish broadcaster RTÉ reports that on the 12th of October,
- 4:49Italian students were sharing pictures of the French school blockades and calling on
- 4:52each other to join in. Belgian pupils joined in the protests,
- 4:57and in Iberia it's the same pattern with housing.
- 5:00Spain's tent camp in Madrid's Puerta del Sol inspired Portugal's camps.
- 5:04Now, activists in both countries want to join one general strike on the 11th of
- 5:08November.
- 5:09And the slogan from those French group chats, "Bismillah, c'est les ténèbres".
- 5:14Italy's news agency, ANSA,
- 5:15says Greta Thunberg used it herself when she joined striking pupils outside Paris on
- 5:20the 13th of October, and it's turned up on placards in Brussels and in chants in
- 5:24Bologna and Milan.
- 5:26Greta Thunberg: Young people are not being included in the conversation.
- 5:28Greta Thunberg: Our future is being robbed away from us.
- 5:30So that's theory one, ideas travelling on phones from one school to the next,
- 5:35which brings us to theory two.
- 5:39It's organised. Someone somewhere is actually coordinating it,
- 5:44and this is where Milan comes in. So after the riots in Milan,
- 5:49a social media channel appeared called Movimento 17 Ottobre,
- 5:52the 17th of October movement. In a few days, it had almost 9,000 followers.
- 5:58Prosecutors say its administrator is a 30-year-old researcher called Youssef Siher.
- 6:03Counter-terrorism prosecutors accuse him of inciting crimes.
- 6:07On his laptop, they say, was a file called Revolution: Instructions for Use,
- 6:11partly modelled on a manual from Egypt's 2011 revolution.
- 6:15It covers things like what to wear, goggles, gloves, spray paint.
- 6:19And they arrested him.
- 6:21On the night of the 24th.
- 6:23Okay, that sounds serious, but does that mean he was running the protests?
- 6:28Reports differ on what investigators found on his laptop.
- 6:31His lawyer says his messages weren't incitement,
- 6:34and one columnist in Il Fatto Quotidiano argues his posts don't meet the legal test
- 6:39for incitement at all.
- 6:41And then on the 28th of October, a judge in Milan refused to confirm his detention.
- 6:46He walked out of San Vittore prison the same day.
- 6:49And then there's theory three, which is the one many governments prefer,
- 6:54foreign hands. In Albania,
- 6:57Prime Minister Edi Rama has blamed foreign hands and pointed at Russia and Iran
- 7:02without giving any evidence. Moscow denies it.
- 7:05In Serbia, for two years, Aleksandar Vučić called the students foreign agents.
- 7:11In France, the president blamed ultra-left groups for the violence.
- 7:14And in Italy, a senior official said many of the young rioters had taken drugs.
- 7:19Which isn't foreign hands at all,
- 7:21but it's another way of saying the anger isn't really about politics.
- 7:25Right. But here's what I find strange.
- 7:28We keep talking as if this began in France this autumn,
- 7:31but Serbia's students have been marching for two years.
- 7:35So maybe the question isn't who started it, but why everyone joined in at once.
- 7:40We put that to Donatella della Porta,
- 7:42who runs the Centre on Social Movement Studies at the Scuola Normale Superiore in
- 7:46Florence. Professor della Porta,
- 7:49is this one European wave or lots of separate stories that just happen to look
- 7:53alike?
- 7:55Donatella della Porta: You have social movements that break the ice.
- 7:59Donatella della Porta: It is not always the case that the French started.
- 8:02Donatella della Porta: Can be another wave of protest. We know it has been Tunisian, Egypt in 2011.
- 8:09Donatella della Porta: We know it has been France, again, in 1968.
- 8:14Donatella della Porta: It was Spain in other moments. So it changes.
- 8:18Donatella della Porta: When conditions are ripe for a broad wave of protest,
- 8:24Donatella della Porta: sometimes it's a small trigger that catalyzes a change.
- 8:28Donatella della Porta: In this case, it has been the protest in France.
- 8:32Donatella della Porta: The protests are characterized by the involvement, first of all,
- 8:38Donatella della Porta: of the high school protesters, so very young activists rather than,
- 8:46Donatella della Porta: as it happened in other waves, the university students.
- 8:50Donatella della Porta: And also they started in the periphery rather than
- 8:56Donatella della Porta: at the geographical center.
- 8:59So for her, the conditions were ripe, and France was the spark.
- 9:03Right. And then we asked her about the other two theories,
- 9:06the organisers and the foreign hands.
- 9:09Donatella della Porta: There are no proof of an intervention by either foreign powers or a sort of,
- 9:18Donatella della Porta: can I say, exploitation of the movements by politicians of the far left in the sense
- 9:26Donatella della Porta: that, of course, politicians from the far left to the far right interact with the
- 9:33Donatella della Porta: protest, they react to the protest.
- 9:36Donatella della Porta: But I don't think they can exert a control on protests which are very broad and
- 9:43Donatella della Porta: organized from below. As a sociologist,
- 9:47Donatella della Porta: I do not think we need to develop conspiracy theories because what happened is quite
- 9:55Donatella della Porta: easy to explain on the basis of, on the one hand,
- 10:01Donatella della Porta: growing dissatisfactions, growing cost of living.
- 10:05That's her reading as a researcher.
- 10:07She does say foreign powers try to sway opinion with fake news, for example,
- 10:12but she sees no proof they're steering these protests.
- 10:15Albania's government still points at foreign hands,
- 10:17and Italy's interior minister said there's no evidence the Milan protesters were
- 10:21directed from outside.
- 10:23So copycats, organisers, or foreign hands.
- 10:27But a movement spreading is one thing. Getting what it wants is another.
- 10:31And so far, Serbia is the only country in this story where the students movement has
- 10:35won an election.
- 10:48Okay, let's start with France,
- 10:50because when we did our episode on the French students,
- 10:53we asked whether teenagers could still bend a government.
- 10:56And?
- 10:57Eh, a bit. On the 26th of October, the government announced a package.
- 11:03Parcoursup, the university admissions platform many pupils hate,
- 11:06will be overhauled this year with a new system promised by 2028.
- 11:1115,000 extra places in higher education, mostly on technical courses,
- 11:16and a cap of 28 pupils in the first year of high school.
- 11:19Édouard Geffray: Parcoursup, which will be both transformed this year and replaced next year.
- 11:2328. That's actually quite specific.
- 11:26It is. Plus a plan worth 5 billion euros for school and university buildings,
- 11:31most of it is cheap loans. But one pupils' leader, Louis Letoublon, said,
- 11:35"Not everything has been met yet, and we'll see this through."
- 11:39And the government's not really in a giving mood either.
- 11:43Not really. After the protests on the weekend of the 24th of October,
- 11:47the Interior Ministry said 1,435 people had been arrested.
- 11:52There have been curfews in parts of several cities,
- 11:55and the higher education minister says the right to protest exists,
- 11:59but the right to blockade does not.
- 12:01Laurent Nuñez: The almost systematic presence everywhere, in every city, of rioters and looters who latched on to these marches, these movements, to loot and smash.
- 12:12France's interior minister told Parliament he knew about inflammatory videos
- 12:15circulating on TikTok and Instagram,
- 12:18and the government believes rioters use social media to find each other.
- 12:22So both sides digging in.
- 12:24Pupils groups and unions have called more protests for the third and the fifth of
- 12:28November.
- 12:29And Italy has gone further still. Five hundred paratroopers on the streets of Milan.
- 12:34A new decree that makes organised violence at a demonstration its own crime,
- 12:37with up to twelve years for organisers and fines for the parents between five
- 12:42hundred and two thousand euros. Additionally,
- 12:45the justice minister wants more space in youth prisons.
- 12:48And in Spain, the housing anger is heading to the ballot box.
- 12:51A general strike on the eleventh of November and a snap election on the
- 12:55twenty-ninth.
- 12:56So that's the picture in the West. Big crowds, real concessions in France,
- 13:00but a lot of police and not much trust.
- 13:03And the governments would say they're protecting schools, shops,
- 13:06and police officers. In France alone,
- 13:08the interior ministry said in mid-October that around nine hundred officers had been
- 13:12hurt. More than two hundred and fifty pupils and students have been injured too.
- 13:17That's the government's side. But Donatella della Porta,
- 13:20who has studied protest policing for decades, thinks a crackdown can also backfire.
- 13:25Donatella della Porta: Before the pandemic, the Fridays for Future on climate change were central,
- 13:33Donatella della Porta: most visible form of mobilizations of the very young people.
- 13:38Donatella della Porta: In fact, they'd started a couple of years before the twenty, the pandemic,
- 13:45Donatella della Porta: and the reactions had been quite inclusive, so it had been quite tolerant.
- 13:52Donatella della Porta: Immediately after the pandemics,
- 13:55Donatella della Porta: what emerged was much more repressive reactions to forms of protests which had
- 14:02Donatella della Porta: remained non-violent. And this meant also a sort of vicious cycles,
- 14:09Donatella della Porta: because the least you appear democratic,
- 14:13Donatella della Porta: the more also you can trigger a convergence between different protest movements to
- 14:20Donatella della Porta: focus on the issues of repression. For instance, in Italy,
- 14:25Donatella della Porta: even the mainstream trade unions are mobilized not only for better salaries or
- 14:31Donatella della Porta: social welfare, but against the repressions of the right to protest.
- 14:38Serbia had its crackdown too, but there the students actually won.
- 14:43Okay, so remind me how long this took.
- 14:45It started two years ago this weekend when the newly renovated station canopy in
- 14:50Novi Sad collapsed and sixteen people lost their lives.
- 14:54Students blockaded their own universities.
- 14:56Two ministers resigned, and at protests,
- 14:59people would stop and stand in silence one minute for each of the dead.
- 15:04And through all that, Vučić stayed in office?
- 15:06For a long time, yes. He called them foreign agents.
- 15:10Critics say pro-government TV hounded their supporters.
- 15:14And Citizen Lab, a Toronto research group,
- 15:16found Pegasus spyware on the phone of the rector of the University of Belgrade
- 15:20without saying who put it there. But the students didn't join an opposition party.
- 15:25At first, they demanded accountability for the canopy.
- 15:28Then last year, early elections became their main demand.
- 15:32They say they collected nearly four hundred thousand signatures in a single day.
- 15:37And in June, Vučić finally said he'd step down and call a vote.
- 15:41And then he resigned as president to run for prime minister himself.
- 15:45Right. And this part is unusual. The students didn't stand themselves.
- 15:51Their assemblies at each university proposed the candidates, professors,
- 15:55farmers, actors, even a rapper.
- 15:58And the result, honestly, it wasn't even close in the end.
- 16:02No. On the twenty-fifth of October,
- 16:05the Students' List won about a hundred and forty of the two hundred and fifty seats
- 16:09on the preliminary count. Vučić's coalition got just over a hundred.
- 16:13Turnout was almost sixty-nine percent.
- 16:16Aleksandar Vučić: I want to inform you that, on the basis of the stratified sample, it is clear that we have lost this election. The student-blockader list has won.
- 16:30That's Vučić on election night.
- 16:32It is now clear that we have lost and the Students' List has won.
- 16:36Then he blamed independent media and foreign interference, again.
- 16:40Maybe, but it's not finished.
- 16:42Voting was repeated at fifty-three polling stations on the first of November,
- 16:46and the election commission still has to sign off the results before Parliament can
- 16:50meet. The acting president, Ana Brnabić from Vučić's party,
- 16:54says she'll call Parliament as soon as that happens.
- 16:57The legal deadline is the tenth of December.
- 17:00And meanwhile, tempers are running high.
- 17:02About thirty protesters walked into the newsroom of a pro-government TV channel,
- 17:06Informer, during a live broadcast, surrounded its owner and called for his arrest.
- 17:11Which the Students' List condemned and Vučić called an attack on press freedom.
- 17:16So even winning is complicated.
- 17:19We asked Donatella della Porta why Serbia's students got as far as they did.
- 17:23Donatella della Porta: Well, in Serbia it has been mobilized for longer.
- 17:28Donatella della Porta: It has been years since the students started to protest.
- 17:34Donatella della Porta: Also, they're against some trigger, which became symbolically relevant.
- 17:40Donatella della Porta: Catastrophe that, according to the protesters,
- 17:44Donatella della Porta: was due to the corruption of the regimes which killed many young people.
- 17:50Donatella della Porta: And it became the sort of central focus because it meant it went beyond what had
- 17:59Donatella della Porta: happened in a specific moment,
- 18:02Donatella della Porta: becoming a symbol about how a corrupt regime was selling out the Serbians,
- 18:11Donatella della Porta: especially destroying the future of new generations to...
- 18:17Donatella della Porta: For the interest of a few rich people in the government.
- 18:24A symbol. That's what the canopy became for the protesters
- 18:29So in the West, governments are mostly answering with police and paperwork.
- 18:33In Serbia, the students went all the way, and just to the south in Albania,
- 18:38it's something else entirely.
- 18:41In Albania, the government's answer to corruption was a chatbot.
- 18:51A quick word about Pollar. It's free to read with no ads and no data sales,
- 18:56and every story links to the reporting behind it.
- 18:59Get the twice daily brief on the web or in the app for iPhone and Android.
- 19:03To help keep Pollar independent, become a member.
- 19:06Supporter, from two dollars ninety-nine a month, adds listening,
- 19:09offline reading, and weekly deep dives.
- 19:11Founder adds a private community and a say in what comes next.
- 19:21Okay, so tell me about Diella properly. Where did she come from?
- 19:25She started life as a help-desk. In January two thousand and twenty-five,
- 19:29Albania launched her on its government services website to help people get documents
- 19:34like birth certificates. She was built by the state IT agency known as AKSHI with
- 19:39Microsoft using OpenAI's models.
- 19:43So a customer service bot.
- 19:45A customer service bot. Then she got a voice, a face, and a folk costume.
- 19:50And in September two thousand and twenty-five,
- 19:53Edi Rama put her in his new cabinet as Minister of State for Artificial Intelligence
- 19:58in charge of public tenders.
- 20:00He promised they'd be one hundred percent free of corruption.
- 20:04One hundred percent. That's a bold number.
- 20:08It is. And then a month later, at a conference in Berlin,
- 20:12Rama announced that Diella was pregnant.
- 20:14I'm sorry. What?
- 20:17Diella is pregnant, and she's expecting eighty-three kids.
- 20:21One AI assistant for every socialist MP.
- 20:24They'd sit in parliament and take notes and, his words,
- 20:27"If you go for coffee and forget to come back to work,
- 20:30this child will say what was said when you were not in the hall."
- 20:34Okay, that's a good line. Did the kids ever arrive?
- 20:37We couldn't find any sign of them.
- 20:40But the reporting network OCCRP turned up something else.
- 20:44The summer before Diella became a minister, a tech businessman, Gerond Meçe,
- 20:48says men claiming to be from the anti-corruption unit put a hood over his head
- 20:52outside his home in Tirana.
- 20:54He says they let him go once he agreed to drop his complaints about more than a
- 20:57dozen contracts from AKSHI,
- 21:01the agency that built Diella.
- 21:03In December twenty twenty-five,
- 21:05a court put AKSHI's director under house arrest at the prosecutors' request.
- 21:11The prosecutors say AKSHI's tenders were rigged,
- 21:14that companies in the scheme issued fake invoices,
- 21:17and that kickbacks were paid in cash hidden in wine boxes.
- 21:21Assets worth about forty million euros have been seized.
- 21:24Nobody has been convicted.
- 21:27AKSHI and the government didn't answer OCCRP's questions,
- 21:31and building Diella wasn't one of the deals under investigation.
- 21:35Okay. So it's the agency, not her.
- 21:38Right. But it gets more awkward. The actress whose face and voice Diella uses,
- 21:43Anila Bisha, has taken the government to court.
- 21:46She says she agreed to be a help desk assistant, not a minister.
- 21:50The government denies misusing her likeness.
- 21:53And on the eighth of October,
- 21:55Albania's Constitutional Court threw out the opposition's challenge to Diella's
- 21:59appointment. The court didn't rule on whether making Diella a minister was
- 22:03constitutional, but the court did say this about a minister's powers:
- 22:08the use of a technological tool cannot create, expand, transfer,
- 22:13or replace these powers.
- 22:15So the humans are still responsible.
- 22:17Yes. The court didn't name anyone, and it wasn't ruling on corruption,
- 22:21but who's responsible is roughly the question the students on the street are asking
- 22:25less politely.
- 22:26And we covered how that began in our Albania three by three.
- 22:30Tuition fees, rundown dorms, corruption in universities,
- 22:33a protest outside the education ministry that turned violent within hours.
- 22:38And in the first week, the authorities counted three hundred and ten people injured,
- 22:42most of them police officers, government buildings set on fire,
- 22:46and Rama refusing to go, saying he has a mandate to finish the EU talks.
- 22:51Rama said in a video address that this is not a student phenomenon and blamed
- 22:56foreign hands that do not wish for Albania to be at peace.
- 22:59Again, he hasn't said whose hands. He also told Reuters in written answers,
- 23:04"We had elections last year, not a revolution."
- 23:07And his government's target is EU membership by two thousand and thirty.
- 23:12Which is real, to be fair. Albania is one of the frontrunners.
- 23:15It's opened every chapter of its talks, and it started closing them.
- 23:19It has, but corruption is still a major obstacle.
- 23:23In Transparency International's latest index,
- 23:25Albania fell to ninety-first of a hundred and eighty-two.
- 23:29The EU's delegation warned that fighting corruption is essential to joining.
- 23:33So the government says, "Stick with us. We'll get you into Europe."
- 23:37And the students say...
- 23:38We will get there first. Albania's population fell by about fifteen percent between
- 23:44twenty eleven and twenty twenty-three, mostly because people left.
- 23:48Hmm. Although the people who left aren't really gone, are they?
- 23:53No. And that's something Donatella della Porta pointed out to us.
- 23:57Albania, she says, isn't just following the others.
- 24:00Donatella della Porta: I think they are inspired, but they are also inspiring,
- 24:05Donatella della Porta: is that the younger generation,
- 24:08Donatella della Porta: so those who were forced to leave the countries also played an important role
- 24:14Donatella della Porta: because as diasporas, they continued to be connected both with their country of
- 24:21Donatella della Porta: origins and the country they moved to.
- 24:25Donatella della Porta: So they acted also as a sort of trade union between different movements.
- 24:32So an AI minister, an EU target,
- 24:35and a generation that might not be there to see it,
- 24:38but Albania's grievances are pretty specific.
- 24:40So why are young people in so many countries angry at the same time,
- 24:44and why is so little being answered?
- 24:47Okay, so let's do the big question. Why now?
- 24:51And I think the first answer is just money.
- 24:54The cost of everything.
- 24:56The war in Iran and the disruption in the Strait of Hormuz keep pushing up fuel and
- 25:00energy prices. In September, prices in the Euro area were up 3.8% on a year before.
- 25:07Pay per employee, by the European Central Bank's latest figure, was up 3.3%,
- 25:12and that was in the spring.
- 25:14So prices are still running ahead of pay, and Mario Draghi,
- 25:17the former head of the ECB, put it in two words: blocked expectations.
- 25:22Which I think is a very polite way of saying you can't afford to leave home.
- 25:26Yeah, and Italy's president, Sergio Mattarella,
- 25:30said society can't treat young people with indifference,
- 25:33pointing to how many under 35s are emigrating.
- 25:36The second answer is trust. In Serbia, it was a canopy.
- 25:40In Albania, contracts and courts. When people think the system is rigged,
- 25:44a few concessions don't fix it.
- 25:47And the third is the phone in everyone's pocket.
- 25:49The French government blames TikTok and Instagram.
- 25:52The students say the phones are just how they talk.
- 25:55Either way, a picture from a school gate in Paris reaches Milan the same afternoon.
- 25:59Estonia's former president, Kersti Kaljulaid,
- 26:02called it intergenerational hopelessness.
- 26:05And there's a fourth thing, which I didn't really expect: fear of war.
- 26:11Donatella della Porta grew up in Italy in the '70s and '80s,
- 26:14and she put it like this.
- 26:16Donatella della Porta: For me, growing up in Western Europe in the '70s and the '80s,
- 26:22Donatella della Porta: we saw risks of wars, but it was something very distant,
- 26:28Donatella della Porta: and the European Union legitimized itself as the institutions that will grant peace
- 26:37Donatella della Porta: in Europe. For these generations,
- 26:40Donatella della Porta: there is no longer these expectations of a peaceful Europe.
- 26:45Donatella della Porta: There is the expectations that if the world is not going to die because of climate
- 26:53Donatella della Porta: change, it may die because of an atomic bomb.
- 26:58Climate or the bomb, that's a lot to carry to school.
- 27:02And you can hear it in the demands. In Italy,
- 27:05dock workers struck against war on the 30th of October on a day of action that
- 27:09unions say more than 100 ports worldwide joined.
- 27:13In Germany, the marchers want money for schools, not the military.
- 27:16In both, it's the same trade: books, not weapons.
- 27:20But here's what bugs me. If it's prices and phones, those are everywhere,
- 27:25so why isn't everyone protesting?
- 27:27That's the question I find most interesting, actually.
- 27:30Take Hungary, huge frustration with the government for years, but in April,
- 27:34voters threw out Viktor Orbán at the ballot box after 16 years,
- 27:39and the new prime minister, Péter Magyar, now wants to lower the voting age to 16.
- 27:44So the anger had somewhere to go.
- 27:46Exactly. And in Poland, there have been protests this autumn about abortion law,
- 27:51for example, but nothing like the wave in France, at least not yet.
- 27:55And Germany stayed quiet until the last day of October,
- 27:59then it joined in with almost no organisation behind it.
- 28:02Right. On Saturday, the 31st of October,
- 28:05tens of thousands marched in about 30 German cities.
- 28:09Organisers said more than 100,000. Most marches were peaceful,
- 28:13but afterwards, rioters looted shops in Frankfurt and police there made 54 arrests.
- 28:19The marchers wanted money for schools and no return of conscription.
- 28:23And interestingly, Germany's national pupils conference backed some of the demands
- 28:27at first, then distanced itself from the marches.
- 28:30It did, over calls for violence online.
- 28:33Della Porta told us the anti-military demand put some student groups off, too,
- 28:38and this one was organised almost entirely online by a small new team.
- 28:42Sociologists call that connective organising,
- 28:45a social media call with very little structure behind it.
- 28:49So maybe a protest needs two things,
- 28:51a pressure everyone feels and a spark that's local, a canopy, a school blockade,
- 28:56a tuition bill.
- 28:57And somewhere to aim it. Hungary had a ballot box.
- 29:01Serbia's students built an electoral list of their own.
- 29:04So is it one or the other, the street or the ballot box?
- 29:07We asked Donatella della Porta.
- 29:11Donatella della Porta: While the general trend is toward decreasing numbers of people participating in
- 29:19Donatella della Porta: politics in conventional electoral term, you also see exceptions,
- 29:26Donatella della Porta: especially when people see
- 29:29Donatella della Porta: an alternative. When this alternative is there, young people go to vote,
- 29:36Donatella della Porta: so it is not either the streets or the ballot booth, the electorate.
- 29:44Donatella della Porta: But it could be that the streets produce some types of changes within the political
- 29:52Donatella della Porta: parties or through new parties that make sometimes for the success of an
- 30:00Donatella della Porta: alternative.
- 30:04So that's how she sees it.
- 30:06A lot of young people don't feel the old kind of politics is listening to them.
- 30:09You vote every few years, parties come and go, and nothing seems to change,
- 30:14so the street starts to feel like the only place where things actually move.
- 30:19Which honestly matches the numbers. In France,
- 30:22a poll in October found 78% of young people think politicians are doing a poor job
- 30:27of preparing their future. But here's the twist.
- 30:3080% of them still said they plan to vote in the next presidential election,
- 30:34so it's not that they've given up on the ballot box.
- 30:37It's more that it doesn't feel like enough on its own.
- 30:39And if one thing keeps coming up, it's housing.
- 30:42Della Porta told us the demands travel from schools to health to housing,
- 30:47like in Spain, rent, dorms, just somewhere to live.
- 30:51Tents in Madrid's Puerta del Sol, tents in Lisbon and Porto,
- 30:55students camping in Syntagma Square in Athens.
- 30:58And none of it is over. In Portugal, on the third of November,
- 31:02almost fifty public figures from left and right signed a manifesto asking the Prime
- 31:07Minister to answer on housing, not just on policing.
- 31:10And Spain, like we said, takes it to the ballot box,
- 31:13a general strike on the eleventh and an early election on the twenty-ninth of
- 31:17November.
- 31:18France has a national strike on the fifth of November over the budget,
- 31:22and youth groups are joining in. In Albania,
- 31:24students marched again on the last day of October,
- 31:27and the government has brought in fines of up to five and a half thousand euros for
- 31:31staying in a violent crowd.
- 31:33In Germany, more than a hundred police officers were hurt in the Frankfurt riots,
- 31:37and politicians are still arguing about who the rioters were.
- 31:40And in Serbia, the Students' List is waiting for the election commission to sign off
- 31:44before Parliament can meet.
- 31:46So think back over everything we've covered.
- 31:49A chatbot minister in Albania and the agency that built her under investigation.
- 31:54A stranger called Mamadou in French pupils group chats.
- 31:57A young man in Milan held and then freed by a judge.
- 32:01A station canopy in Novi Sad,
- 32:03and students who turned two years of marching into an election win.
- 32:07Different countries, different sparks,
- 32:09but underneath the same question we started with, who actually answers to them?
- 32:14In Serbia, the answer came from the ballot box.
- 32:17Everywhere else, we'll keep watching.
- 32:20Just probably not a chatbot.
- 32:24Thanks for listening to this episode of Pollar.
- 32:26If you want to read more about the youth protests or any European issue,
- 32:30you can do so at pollar.news.
- 32:33We are a relatively new podcast, so every comment, rating, and voice of support,
- 32:38or even negative feedback, means a lot to us.
- 32:40Please let us know what you think in a comment or a review.
- 32:44And thank you to Donatella della Porta,
- 32:46professor at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Florence,
- 32:48for talking to us for this episode.
- 32:51Sources for this episode are at pollar.news.