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.
Students are expected to be joined by workers’ unions and key figures from the so-called “yellow vest” movement.
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.
