The younger generation did everything it was asked to do. It studied, gained skills, worked, moved and accepted uncertainty as a temporary price. Except the temporary became permanent, and the promised return never came.
When the time came to collect on that promise, it found a world in which housing was slipping out of reach, work did not always guarantee dignity, a degree offered no certainty of a future and public services were deteriorating. It also found political leaders who continued to speak the language of progress while the daily experience of many young people told a different story. This generation did not fail to follow the instructions; the social contract failed to honor its side of the bargain.
The protests emerging in different parts of the world bring this rupture into view. In France, students demanding more teachers and decent school facilities found themselves at the forefront of a broader protest against the cost of living and the erosion of public services. In Belgium, university students are resisting higher education costs and barriers to access. In Portugal, the housing squeeze is driving people into the streets. In Italy, soaring prices and insecurity are feeding discontent. In Albania, young people are pushing back against a system where corruption has hollowed out both education and employment, erasing any prospect of a future.
In Lyon, students marched at the front while workers and trade union members formed a human shield around them. That image captures something deeper than yet another demonstration: intergenerational solidarity. Older people did not stand over the young to explain that ‘this is just how life is.’ They stood beside them because they understood that defending the future must not be the sole responsibility of those who will have to live in it. When a worker protects a student, they are not only defending a child’s right to education; they are defending the continuity of society itself. Perhaps this is how the constellation of resistances truly begins to align: when struggles cease to be solitary; when generations recognize the threat they share; and when the injustice inflicted on someone else is no longer dismissed as someone else’s problem.
NEWSLETTER TABLE TALK
Never miss a story.
Subscribe now.
The most important news & topics every week in your inbox.
And the constellation does not end at Europe’s borders. In Rio de Janeiro, thousands of students marched in defense of public education, democracy and rights they believe are under threat. In Athens, students pitched tents outside Parliament to protest the cost of housing and studying, saying they were making common cause with young people in other countries. Their starting points may differ, but the act itself is shared: a generation refuses to watch on in silence as decisions narrow its future.
It would be easy to label all of this a single global uprising—easy but premature. These societies are distinct, their demands are not identical and their political circumstances differ. It would also be dangerous to romanticize the violence that has surfaced on the fringes of some demonstrations. Violence often obscures the peaceful majority and gives those in power the precise image they need to evade the substance of the demands. The mistake, however, would be to see only isolated incidents and ignore the common ground beneath them.
The younger generation is not taking to the streets because it rejects effort. It is doing so because effort no longer produces a foreseeable return. It is not asking to be handed an easy life. It is asking that a dignified life not be turned into an inherited privilege. It is asking education to open doors rather than pile up qualifications that offer no way forward; work to make independence possible; and democracy not to listen only when frustration spills into the streets.
The social contract is not a document we sign; it is the invisible agreement that society will recognize effort, protect dignity and keep the possibility of progress open. That agreement has two sides. A society cannot demand responsibility, patience and adaptability from the young while giving them permanent insecurity in return—and then accuse them of impatience.
The serious counterargument must be heard. Realities differ from country to country, some indicators have improved and not all young people experience the same dead end. No honest analysis should erase progress or present different societies as a single landscape of despair. But better metrics are not enough to cancel out the lived experience of a generation. A job that does not allow someone to plan a life is recorded as employment, but it is not lived as independence. A degree without prospects remains an achievement, but it does not fulfill the promise of social mobility.
The history of social rights reminds us of something we often forget once hard-won gains have been absorbed into everyday life: most of what we now take for granted was not granted by the kindness of those in power. The right to vote, public education, the eight-hour working day, social protection, equality and freedom of expression were won because people organized, went on strike, marched, challenged, persevered and refused to accept injustice as the natural order of things.
Resistance does not necessarily mean violence. It is the refusal to grow accustomed to whatever diminishes us. It is the vote that is not given away; the strike and the peaceful march; the occupation of public space; the journalism that refuses to fall silent; the solidarity that turns private fear into a public demand. Societies do not change only through great eruptions. They change when enough people stop believing, at the same time, that they are alone.
Perhaps this is where a constellation of resistances begins to form. A constellation is not made up of identical stars, nor of lights positioned side by side. It consists of separate points which reveal a pattern when viewed together. The high school student in France, the university student in Athens, the young worker in Italy, the person priced out of the housing market in Portugal, the student challenging corruption in Albania and the young woman defending democracy in Rio are not making the same demand. Yet they recognize the same fracture: the future they were promised keeps receding as they struggle to reach it.
We do not yet know whether these lights will align. We do know, however, that these movements are beginning to speak to one another as young people recognize aspects of their own lives in the demands of their peers in other countries. This is a profoundly political shift: the moment a personal dead end ceases to be interpreted as an individual failure and is recognized as a shared condition, collective action is born.
The real danger to democracies is not that young people are taking to the streets. It is that they may stop believing it is worth engaging with civic life at all. A democracy that listens to them only when the streets are burning has already failed to listen in time. And when its only answer to discontent is repression, paternalism or selective statistics of success, it confirms the charge that institutions know how to count young people, but not how to understand them.
Political responsibility is not about temporarily calming anger or appropriating its language for the next election; it is about restoring the link between effort and prospects. That requires affordable housing, strong public education, work that sustains a life rather than mere survival, public services that are not abandoned and genuine participation by young people in the decisions that shape their future.
But responsibility extends beyond the young. A society cannot enjoy rights won through the resistance of previous generations while asking today’s youth to endure in silence. It cannot glorify revolutions, strikes and movements in history, only to take offense when present-day dissent disturbs the status quo. Every generation has the right to challenge the terms of an agreement that is not being honored.
I want to believe that this constellation of resistances is beginning to align. Not because I yearn for destruction, violence or chaos, but because I hope that scattered acts of personal resistance can become a conscious, collective and democratic force. A force that will demand more than minor corrections to a system that keeps producing the same insecurity, and insist that the terms of the social contract be rewritten with justice, dignity and genuine prospects.
This generation did everything it was asked to do. Now it has taken to the streets not to tear down the world it inherited, but to remind that world of what it was promised. It is not asking to be given tomorrow; it is asking not to be denied the chance to create it. In doing so, it is committing its most hopeful act: transforming frustration from a solitary fate into collective action.
If those who kept their side of the bargain are now forced to resist simply to be heard, who exactly broke the social contract first?