Why Europe’s protests are about more than austerity and rising costs

Protests have spread this autumn from France to Belgium, Italy, Spain, Greece and Albania, with some turning violent. They are not centrally organised, and the grievances differ from school conditions, tuition, housing, living costs. The common thread is the sense of public provision thinning out.

Governments across Europe are cutting deficits. France's draft 2027 budget contains €54 billion in cuts and savings, with education funding rising below inflation. Belgium is seeking €10 billion in savings. Spending per French secondary student was slightly lower in 2024 than in 2010, according to ministry data. Welfare programmes have not been abolished, but the pressure shows as frozen benefits, unfilled posts and decaying buildings. In Albania, the protest started against US billionaire Jared Kushner's luxury resort project. They then broadened to corruption and a shrinking social welfare net, now demanding the resignation of Prime Minister Edi Rama.

Western welfare states built in Soviet Shadow

Several studies argue that Western welfare states expanded partly because of Cold War competition. Obinger and Schmitt found that regime competition raised social spending on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Petersen describes expansion as an anti-communist strategy, and Sant'Anna and Weller find that communist parties could push redistribution mainly when elites felt threatened. Michael Dover argues that elite support for welfare spending fell faster after 1991 as the USSR collapsed. Data compiled by economists like Thomas Piketty and networks like the World Inequality Database validate this sinister picture.

The logic is that the Soviet Union, and strong communist parties and unions at home, gave Western elites a reason to buy social peace. When that rival system collapsed, so did the incentive. The thesis is contested, as welfare states also grew from domestic labour movements and national settlements, and the Cold War effect is hard to isolate statistically. This could further explain the protest across Europe being driven by the labour unions and left mobilisations. Nevertheless, it offers a useful vantage point for understanding the recent developments. Broad social provision was partly sustained by the need to preserve political legitimacy, and as the pressure diminished, governments face renewed demands for fiscal restraint.

Social reproduction of elites

Pierre Bourdieu developed the idea of cultural capital while studying the French education system. He argued that schools, although presented as meritocratic, reproduce class structure. Families transmit language, habits and familiarity with "legitimate" culture, which schools reward and the advantage is then converted into credentials and then into economic and social capital. In his work on elite institutions, he described how this process helps produce a governing class. .

This framework explains who is affected when budgets tighten, and why schools become flashpoints. The Concours Général is France's most prestigious national high school academic prize; it deliberately sets tests on material outside the standard national curriculum, and the most comprehensive coaching for these is provided in elite public schools and wealthy private schools. The exam is required to get into good colleges, which has become deliberate screening based on the social location of children

If education is where advantage is passed on, then underfunded classrooms in poor areas and gatekept university admissions are not just service failures: they widen the gap between those who accumulate capital and those who do not. Students in several countries are protesting precisely about access, crowding and cost. The problem becomes more acute when these inequalities intersect with generational divisions.

According to Pew, the global median age of national leaders is 63, while the current global median age is 31.1 years old, according to the latest United Nations demographic data. It is a representation gap: the people governing are about twice as old as the people governed.

The world was and still is grappling with gerontocracy, as capital is reproduced and transmitted from one generation to another without a change in the composition of elites. The concentration of political authority remains concentrated among older generations even as the youth faces uncertainty over education, employment and housing.

Capitalism and the ouroboros moment

Capitalism needs a continuous loop of production and consumption. AI disrupts this loop by creating a structural paradox within the relationship. If companies successfully implement AI transformation and automate most of blue-collar and white-collar jobs, that loop of production and consumption loosens. Because workers are also consumers, a jobless economy leaves no one with the purchasing power to buy the very product that AI efficiently produces.

However, it would be an oversimplification to ignore that these protests have specific reasons respective to their national politics, which are being worsened by the energy crisis and rising fuel prices seeping into core inflation. This evolving material condition of humans are also increasing the scope of resistance more and more.

Bourdieu explains how social production of elites concentrates wealth and power. Where public provision thins, families with little cultural or economic capital lose the most, while those who already hold capital can buy private alternatives or navigate gatekept systems more easily.

Combined, they suggest a sequence. The political pressure that once protected broad access to public goods fades, the reproduction of advantage becomes more visible, and the groups with the least capital turn to the street because they have fewer institutional channels and legitimate authority. Young people, who are entering systems of education and work with the least accumulated capital, are a natural group to mobilise.