Youth protest spreads across Germany, France, the Netherlands and Switzerland

Squares across Europe have been crossed in recent days by a youth mobilisation that has touched at least four countries, with numbers that reports describe in the order of hundreds of thousands of participants overall. In Germany the protest involved more than 30 cities, where young people from the so-called Generation Z took to the streets to demand action on housing costs and education and to oppose the reintroduction of compulsory military service.

In France the mobilisation has reached the third act of a sequence of protests that is now taking shape in a more structured appointment: a general strike has been announced for November 5th, a sign that the French protest is seeking a more stable organisational form compared with isolated street demonstrations.

In the Netherlands tension rose during the protests in The Hague, where police arrested 34 people, most of them minors, according to local Dutch outlets. The data on the age of those detained signals how much the phenomenon involves above all the youngest segments of the population, without this authorising — nor does the account of events require — the identification of individual minors involved.

In Switzerland too the climate has grown tense: in Zurich student protests led to direct clashes with law enforcement, according to local Swiss outlets. The episode fits into the same thread of mobilisation crossing the continent, albeit with demands and forms of protest differing from country to country.

The overall picture emerging from these weeks is one of a protest spread across several fronts — housing, education, military service, public budget — which has no single common leadership but shares the generation of its protagonists and the choice of the square as a tool of pressure. The next test will be the French strike on November 5th, the first appointment with a date set in advance after weeks of spontaneous mobilisations.