Tens of thousands of people in 50 Spanish cities have taken to the streets over the country's housing crisis, while French students have clashed with police in protests over underfunded schools. Although the specific grievances differ, both waves of mainly youth-led protest highlight a growing problem for western European governments: a generation feeling denied the basic socioeconomic security their parents enjoyed.
Housing crisis in Spain
In Spain, where rents have risen by 80% in a decade, the trigger was the eviction of an 87-year-old woman in Madrid after an investment fund hiked her rent by 230%. For those spending over half their income on housing—the monthly rental on a one-bedroom flat can cost an entire median salary—the situation became untenable.
Rocketing rents, rampant property speculation, the boom in short-term tourist rentals and stagnant wages have made independent adult life increasingly unachievable for many young workers. The state is seen not as a neutral mediator but an active enabler of property speculation, with a banner at the protest camp in Madrid's Puerta del Sol plaza reading: "You can speculate on watches, jewels, crypto-bros and Ferraris. But not on our fucking homes."
Education protests in France
In France, protests began in the northern Paris suburbs and spread nationwide, fuelled by anger at an underfunded education system that, data shows, entrenches social inequality. Pupils routinely miss months of teaching due to unfilled staff absences, and timetables run from 8am to 6pm—among the longest in Europe—in buildings with leaking roofs, cockroaches and collapsing ceilings.
Slogans include "More hours in class than for sleep", "Fund study, not repression" and "I'd like to be worrying about my maths exam, not my future." In Paris, students on high school barricades saw budget cuts as an assault on their future, believing a system meant to promote social mobility now prevents it.
Government responses and political fallout
Neither government has much room for manoeuvre. Spain's socialist prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, called a snap general election after rightwing parties voted down his emergency housing legislation. In France, as student protests—and more than 5,000 arrests—forced the closure of up to 500 secondary schools, centrist prime minister Sébastien Lecornu urged local authorities to prioritise filling long-term teacher absences and called urgent meetings to discuss repairing dilapidated school buildings.
Radicalised opposition parties are weaponising the discontent. On the radical left, France's Jean-Luc Mélenchon—backed by 47% of voters under 35—has sided openly with the street, while Spain's Podemos and Sumar blame the housing crisis on out-of-control financial capitalism. The populist far right plays a law-and-order card, with Marine Le Pen's National Rally seizing on footage of burning barricades to accuse centrist leaders of tolerating "unbridled violence", and Spain's Vox siding with the Partido Popular to torpedo Sánchez's package.
As Nando de Anguulo, a 26-year-old protester in Madrid, put it: the protests prove that as things stand, "it is us, the people, who have to adapt to the political parties—and not the politicians who have to adapt to what the people want. It can't go on like that."
