by Rajan Philips
Paris has exploded in protests barely two weeks after peacefully assembling nearly a million people on its streets to welcome and salute Pope Leo XIV on his first visit to France. The good Pope himself has since been diagnosed with lung cancer and is convalescing after surgery in the Vatican. The protest triggers in France are youth frustrations over the state of the country’s education system and the broken conditions of its schools. The scale and mode of the current protests have brought back memories of the great French student protests in May 1968. The two are not the same and even though they may be comparable in appearance, the circumstances between then and now are vastly different and so will be the consequences.
It is not only in Paris, but the protests are also everywhere else in France. As well as in other cities in other countries in Europe and extending beyond. The protest triggers vary from country to country, but the arc of the protests from Paris to Delhi has a common strand: youth frustrations. Everywhere, it is the youth that is on the march – for better education in France, Belgium, Greece, Germany, Ireland, Albania and Austria; housing access and affordability in Spain; and opposition to official tampering with electoral voter lists in India. The young are restless about their future. “No future, no calm” is the chant in Paris.
France’s union of students, Union Syndicale Lycéenne (USL) had outlined four basic grievances before the protests began: “lack of teachers and staff, “dilapidated lycées,” overloaded timetables and classes, and the stress caused by Parcoursup” (a government web portal used for university admissions). The French government’s initial lukewarm response provoked the protests and when the government took a ham fisted approach, things went out of control. It has been the same story in other countries.
In India, the Modi government unleashed the police forces on students and others protesting the manipulation of the voter lists by the Chief Election Commissioner, Gyanesh Kumar, and calls for his resignation have become the rallying cry of the protests. The protests are no longer limited to the “Cockroach” youth movement or the Cockroach Janata Party (CJP), and more mainstream opposition parties are all in the fray.
Defending the Constitution has become the new motif for Rahul Gandhi and the Congress Party. The Cockroach movement that first tasted political blood in June this year, by forcing the resignation of the Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan over national exam leaks, is looking for a second scalp. The government is not in any immediate danger, but Prime Minister Narendra Modi is rapidly losing his political varnish and these protests may mark the beginning of his retirement.
In Spain, Socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez has called a snap election on the housing question, hoping to steal a march on the conservative Popular Party that has been leading in the opinion polls. Mr. Sanchez has been in power since 2018 and, despite the fluctuations in domestic approval rating, has gained international prominence following his clashes with Trump and Isreal over Gaza and the Iran war.
The beleaguered French President Emmanual Macron has six months left in office, and the next presidential election will be held in either April or May next year. In the cabinet meeting after three weeks of protests, President Macron reportedly acknowledged “that young people have legitimate concerns, but said these are being exploited for political purposes and turned into urban violence.”
The two main contenders to replace Macron are Jean-Luc Mélenchon who leads the far-left France Unbowed (LFI) Party, and Marine Le Pen leading the far-right National Rally (RN Party. Mélenchon is supportive of the protests, has condemned police brutality, and has participated in the Paris demonstrations. Le Pen, on the other hand, who is also the front runner in opinion polls, has blamed the students and supports police deployment against them.
There is also speculation that former President François Hollande (2012-2017) may stage a comeback as a more normal alternative to the two extreme contenders. Although he was deeply unpopular when he left office foregoing a second run, Mr. Hollande is considered to have been mostly mocked (as Rain Man) but not at all hated. His moderate positions and his socialist roots may attract a portion of the French electorate that is tired of “Jupiter” Macron and is weary of the diametrically opposite prospects.
1968 Throwback
Whichever way, an orderly transition through France’s “rentrée politique” is in the offing, and the protesters are not clamouring to overthrow anything. That is a far cry from what transpired in 1968, when student protests ultimately led to the ouster of Charles de Gaulle. And there was more. Amidst convulsions in the US over Civil Rights legislation and the prosecution of the Vietnam War, Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy were assassinated, President Johnson declared that he will not be a candidate in the 1968 presidential election, and Richard Nixon was elected as President eight years after his defeat by John Kennedy.
Besides the protests in France, there were protests in the then Communist countries and Yugoslavia, the Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia, the start of the troubles in Northern Ireland, and uprisings against military juntas in Latin America. Africa was becoming more and more independent and there were strong prospects of secular nationalism in the Middle East. The year 1968 also marked the start of many social movements including feminism, and the environmental and anti-war movements. Socialists were a force to reckon with in France and Italy, both politically and electorally. New Left politics was emerging as a counter to both unbridled capitalism and Soviet orthodoxy. The Club of Rome was born in 1968.
“L’imagination au pouvoir” (Power to the imagination) became the battle cry in Paris in May 1968. The protests were infused with optimism for a new social order supervening the postwar material progress. There were powerful cultural and literary overtones that have proved to be more durable than the political projects that inspired them. Television became the main political medium, if not also the message. Although the state power and structures survived, other structures were broken and the intellectual and cultural legacies of 1968 have continued.
It is a different ball of wax in 2026. The protesting students are not looking for any brave new world, but for decent furniture, clean toilets and back to basics teaching and immediate remedies to problems that should not be there in the first place. In Spain, the younger generation is looking for housing at affordable rents. European demographics are also not helpful. The ageing population has its own needs and demands while the youth are increasingly drawn from the immigrant and the working class sections of society. High youth unemployment, zero growth, and government debt have become recipe for stagnation and not resolution. In theory, it is called “gerontonomia,” a form of “democratically sustained economic stagnation.”
In politics, the radicals and populists were dominantly on the right unlike in 1968 when the political left held sway even if it was not in power. Donald Trump, who vulgarly led the rise of the ugly right, may be on his way out, but it is a different story elsewhere. The right has returned to power practically in every South American country. Brazil is almost equally divided between its socialist President Lula de Silva and his presidential challenger Flavio Bolsonaro, the Senator son of Jair Bolsonaro who is in prison for fomenting insurrection to upend the 2022 presidential election.
In 1968, China was at the peak of its Cultural Revolution. It is a different China now. Indonesia was beginning its post-Soekarno era, just as India was adapting to life without Nehru, albeit in vastly different ways. Field Marshal Ayub Khan was overthrown in Pakistan – then with its two wings, east and west, separated by a thousand miles of Indian territory. Within three years, Bangladesh would break free quite violently, redrawing forever the colonial map of the subcontinent. Bangladesh had another uprising in 2024 and the new government is struggling to keep the many promises it made in the elections that followed the overthrow of Sheikh Hasina after 15 years in power. Imran Khan decidedly eschewed Sri Lanka’s ‘aragalaya’ example to protest his ouster in Pakistan, but the army has locked him up and seems to be in no mood to release him. Now there are protests in Pakistan for his release before it is too late for everyone’s good.
It was all relatively quiet in Sri Lanka in 1968, but it would not be for long. The 1970s and every other decade since have seen political turmoils of one kind or another. 1968 / 1969 were also the years when Sri Lanka’s parliament began considering a response to the 1964 Privy Council ruling (in Bribery Commissioner v. Ranasinghe) and its implications for the ‘unalterably entrenched’ clauses of the Soulbury Constitution.
Dr. Colvin R de Silva, then an opposition LSSP MP, took over the debate and convinced everybody that the path to reforming the constitution was not through amending the Soulbury Constitution, but bypassing it and creating a new constitution and a new republic. Dr de Silva accomplished both but not without creating unintended consequences. Tamil separatism was one, and transforming Sri Lanka into a presidential polity was another. The former has come and gone, while the latter is still in force in spite of many promises and mandates to revert the country to its earlier parliamentary system.
President Dissanayake and the NPP government are the latest in a long line of promisers. The country is waiting for the final fulfillment of the promise and not its betrayal. The government can claim some credit for the current quiet in the country, but it would be a fool’s paradise to assume that peace and power are permanent.