It was always going to come to this. After years of neglecting population needs and shoveling money into the bottomless pit of Project Ukraine, the situation is now exploding across Europe.
Do the demonstrations have staying power and is there any hope of a rebalance of political priorities on the horizon?
Let’s first take a second to remind ourselves about the causes of the social upheaval. While the media try to label this as “school” protests, that’s about as accurate as the yellow vests being just “fuel” protests. Both identify only symptoms of a much wider disease commonly known as neoliberalism and war. If you read closely, you’ll find extreme disenchantment with both as the driving forces behind the chaos on the streets of Europe. A brief list:
- Rising cost of everything.
- Declining real wages.
- Crumbling schools.
- Failure to adequately prepare for effects of climate change.
- Destruction of the social commons.
- All the above made worse by the drive for war.
- All the above made worse by support for genocide.
- And the political class ignores the voters.
It’s all only going to get worse:
European diesel prices are exploding, approaching $200/barrel… Meanwhile, today’s Eurostat report shows eurozone industrial production contracted another 1.1% yoy. Germany’s industrial production is already almost 10% below 2021 levels. And now another massive energy shock is hitting Europe’s already struggling industrial base. Higher diesel prices mean higher transportation costs, higher production costs and ultimately higher inflation. But companies can’t simply pass on these costs indefinitely… Margins get crushed, production gets cut, and more factories become uncompetitive. In other words, Europe is facing another stagflationary shock. The ECB can fight inflation by crushing demand via rate hikes even further worsening the deindustrialization trend and the sovereign debt crisis Europe is fucked…
— Lukas Ekwueme (@ekwufinance) October 18, 2026
While Paris might be the epicenter, it’s important to note that actions are also taking place across France, in Italy, Belgium, Portugal, Spain, Germany, on the EU periphery in Albania, and elsewhere. Where will all the frustration lead?
Extraordinary scenes in France. It feels like we are in a long pre-revolutionary moment. It is unclear when the decisive turning point will come, but come it must.
What is missing are the mass parties that can grasp the significance of this moment and nudge the masses towards the struggle for state power rather than canalising their energies into electoral compromise.
— Paweł Wargan (@pawelwargan) October 17, 2026
I would largely agree with this sentiment. Yet for reasons we’ll get into there’s little chance much change will come without a whole more organization and prolonged and strategic action. As the political class remains wholly committed to neoliberalism and war and more peasants are waking up to just how screwed they are, we’re likely in for is years of a destabilized EU. There are no political forces on the horizon that can even begin to address the frustration we’re seeing boiling over. What’s instead coming is a backlash to the protests and a doubling down.
Here, for example, is WSWS with a sobering summary of the what was taking place in the European halls of power while the simmering demonstrations were about to explode:
The EU summit held on Thursday and Friday in Brussels was an expression of the dangerous escalation of the international war crisis. While the Trump administration, amid its conflict with the European powers, is seeking at least for the moment a certain accommodation with Russia, the EU governments, led by Berlin, are pressing for the continuation and expansion of the Ukraine war. They want to shoulder an increasing share of the financial and military burdens themselves and build Europe into an independent military power.
This is accompanied by an escalation that threatens to provoke a direct war between NATO and Russia, including nuclear war. At the same time, the summit discussions on rearmament, “competitiveness,” trade war and migration underscore that the war drive abroad is inseparably linked to intensified social attacks and authoritarian measures at home.
Let’s start with where the backlash to the backlash is already concentrating its focus before taking a look at the political terrain and offering some thoughts on what’s to come.
Effort to Blame Immigration
While centrists initially acknowledged some of the protestors concerns (while offering to do exactly squat to address them), they now promise a crackdown:
🚨 JUST IN: Macron delivers emergency address to the nation after two days of riots in France The French president vowed to punish all looters and declared that there would be no impunity. “Looking at these images, we all asked ourselves: what is going through their minds? How can French people do this to France? Why burn down Limoges City Hall, the tourist office in Lyon, storm Marseille City Hall, or attack the prefect’s residence in Bordeaux? How could they go this far? Nothing justifies this. It is inexplicable and unforgivable. Tonight, we all feel anger and shame. Seeing the streets of our cities so devastated is unbearable.”
— NEXTA (@nexta_tv) October 18, 2026
We can turn to the US Vice President JD Vance for a tweet representative of the rightwing line against the chaos on the streets:
Western liberals imported the third world into France and other countries in the name of diversity and compassion. They ignored fundamental questions of assimilation and compatibility. They were told it would lead to this and they didn’t listen.
I pray that France, a beautiful country of amazing people, will stop this madness before more of its landmarks burn.
And I hope Americans are paying attention. This is the future congressional Democrats seek for your country.
— JD Vance (@JDVance) October 18, 2026
What the vice ignores is that a liberal immigration policy is also done in the service of capital to create downward pressure on wages through an abundant supply of cheap and exploitable labor.
And we see even anti-immigration politicians like Vance and Meloni in Italy still favor certain types of immigrants and it has nothing to do with cultural “compatibility.” It’s about compatibility for capital. In the US, that means the Trump administration—both 1.0 during the early days of the COVID pandemic and 2.0—turn to “guest workers,” who are more easily exploited than those who don’t have their ability to be in the US tied to their employer. They also can’t unionize.
In Italy, the Meloni government policy is one of bringing in more non-EU workers while parking those unfit for labor at immigrant prisons in Albania outside of EU human rights oversight. Many EU “centrists” have embraced this course of action despite it once being deemed “far right.”
The effort by the right and the center to pin the unrest on immigration will help steer the “silent majority” toward parties like the Alternative for Germany and Le Pen’s National Rally.
The Political Terrain
First, the power of the workers. Do they have enough and will they exercise it?
While union membership is generally higher than in the US, ranging from a little over 10 percent in France to around 30 percent in Italy with Germany somewhere in the middle, many of them have largely been neutered with union leadership acting to suppress worker action.
While trade unions and remnants of the Yellow Vest movement join in the demonstrations against the broken social model in France, the yellow vests also offer a reminder of how the state is likely to respond. That populist working class movement led to widespread state repression until it largely died out with the arrival of the COVID pandemic and its demands mostly ignored.
On November 5, there is set to be a coordinated strike across transport, education, healthcare, and energy sectors, combined with street protests linking Yellow Vests, students, and union members. That would seem to be a start.
In order to have any chance of even getting to the negotiating table, a strategic and sustained shutdown of economic activity like that would likely be necessary in order to inflict losses on the neoliberal ruling class.
There would also need to be community support systems, organization, and popular support in place in order to sustain such an offensive. Perhaps we’ll get to see what groundwork the yellow vests have laid in recent years. And were it to find some success, there would also need to be some sort of program to deal with the international capital cordon sanitaire the West would be sure to impose on a country like France.
To me, a central question for the immediate future is the role of workers in defense-related industries. As Europe spending and political priorities shift to the war drive, what will the stance be of the workers in these industries? They hold a lot of power as shutdowns would certainly gain the attention of the ruling class. Ultimately, any serious movement to change the social direction in European countries also must deal with militarization and the effect on social spending.
For now it appears as if many workers in defense industries are more concerned with better pay and benefits rather than what their labor is producing.
How about political parties?
In Germany there is a working class party on the left that opposes high levels of immigration on the grounds that it helps undercut wages and that the German state is already crumbling and is therefore unable to accommodate more arrivals.
Yet the Alliance for Social Justice and Economic Reason has failed to gain nearly as much traction as the AfD.
In Italy, Meloni is facing increasing pressure from her right. The Democrat Party is appropriately named as it’s mostly worthless in the face of the neoliberal destruction of the social commons and is led by a former Obama campaigns volunteer Elly Schlein.
It could win, but would follow the EU-NATO line of the day.
La France Insoumise, which has supported the demonstrations, faces near certain defeat as centrists are more likely to align with the National Rally.
And while Insoumise is popular among young voters, it gets hammered in the older vote:
If anything the protests will boost Le Pen. According to polls, the French sympathize with the grievances but oppose the demonstrations and back the police. And that was before the rioting over the weekend.
So we’re looking at the very real possibility of the EU’s three largest countries by population and economy being led by far-right parties in the coming years.
What exactly does that “far right” mean though? After all, the AfD and National Rally have been skeptical of Project Ukraine and have expressed anti-EU and anti-NATO positions in the past. So did Meloni. Where do they stand today?
They’re undergoing the usual transformation as they inch closer to power: Backing down on NATO and backing down on the EU. Let’s examine this from the imperial perspective.
How Could the ‘Far Right’ in Power Could Aid Imperial Designs
Ukrainians for the Meat Grinder.
The AfD, similar to the centrists, are naturally making the case the Ukrainian refugees need to go back to Ukraine:
Alternative for Germany co-leader Alice Weidel has called for Ukrainian migrants to return home, singling out military-age men and arguing that Germany can no longer sustain welfare payments for more than one million Ukrainians. Her comments come as the AfD gains electoral strength and Germany’s approach to Ukrainian refugees becomes an increasingly prominent political issue.
Time and the Illusion of Change
By coming into office with vague, vanishing positions on standing up to NATO, the EU, and war with Russia, parties can help extinguish gathering opposition—at least for a time.
The case of Meloni in Italy is illustrative. Those positions helped get her elected where she’s managed the longest-serving government since WWII. She didn’t follow through on any of it, but did help diffuse anti-EU, anti-NATO sentiment, took Italy out of Belt and Road Initiative with China, and completed the previous unelected PM Mario Draghi’s brainchild of ramping up of facilities to receive pricey American LNG facilities to receive. She “supported” Ukraine through it all, and now as her time in office likely draws to a close, she’s almost certain to be followed by another capital-friendly blame-the-immigrants government, or it’s back to neoliberal identity politics with the PD. From an imperial perspective, that’s four-plus good years of vassalage.
The Civilizational Push
We covered this last week, but Secretary of State Marco Rubio has some advice on how these European nationalists should serve the empire. Here’s the money quote from his speech in Athens that equates nationalism with allegiance to US-led Western civilization. And he asks the Europeans to sacrifice themselves:
[The ancient Greeks] believed – fiercely – in the ideal of the great man: the exceptional individual who obtains immortality through his own deeds. But they believed that glory and fame, those things were won through striving, sacrificing and achieving greatly for something larger than yourself. The recurring hero of the ancient Greek world was the man who was willing to pay any cost for a cause worthy of his loyalty.
…It is from the Greeks that the West inherited its sense of duty – an unbreakable loyalty to one’s code, one’s cause, one’s country. Our heroes, the heroes of the West are those who choose to remain faithful to their duty precisely when it is most difficult and painful to do so: the man who is bound by his word, the soldier who will not abandon his post, the captain, the proverbial captain, who goes down with his ship.
What does that look like? Well, for now largely what these “far right” parties are doing. As they inch closer to government, lose the parts of their platform that challenge entrenched power structures (EU, NATO) and they keep the parts that benefit the empire (privatization and rearmament).
Both parties favor continuation of “rearmament” and destruction of the social commons.
For now they still want energy ties with Russia. The concern there is that as they’re already retreating from anti-Brussels and anti-Washington positions, it wouldn’t be surprising to see that go out the window too.
Nationalism and rearmament in deteriorating economies make a dangerous cocktail. As social spending shrinks, workers trying to stay afloat will become increasingly dependent on one of the only games in town: the drive to war.
So with parts of the population in Europe in open revolt and there is nary a political force on the horizon that even aims to address the mounting grievances. Instead there are many who look to make the problem even worse.
Add the rising AfD and National Rally with national rejuvenation programs that (checks notes) aim to further cut and privatize, blame immigrants, and pour money into American weapons manufacturers and energy companies.
With no outlet for the grievances of the young and working class, we’re likely to see more riots return next year and the year after. Here’s a good summary from Un-Diplomatic:
Anyone who’s spent even the slightest amount of time in left spaces has heard the cliche about what is to be done in answer of every problem: Organize! It’s funny because it’s true. But it’s true because organizing—in its thousand meanings—always aims at generating structural or positional advantages, so that when the time comes for a campaign, the deck is stacked favorably. Organizing is a way of waging a war of position. The war of maneuver succeeds because successful wars of position preceded them.
And that’s why the French riots are unlikely to go much farther. It’s the same reason anti-ICE protests have reached their limit; the same reason the #NoKings protests did not metasticize into a more militant movement.
Oligarchs are either winning or have already won the war of position in so many ways. Letting them kill union density took away civil society’s greatest leverage. The repressive capacity of modern national security states serves those with power and in oligarchies, that’s owners of capital.
Without effective wars of position preceding wars of maneuver, mass movements of refusal signal so much revolutionary energy but do so from a position of deep, deep structural disadvantage. And so what will eventually meet the student or the anti-ICE protestor or the anti-monarchist or the peace activist is the baton and the rubber bullet and the police raid.
The importance of understanding the riot as a politics of refusal, though, is to know that the repressive power of the state will neither cow nor deter the next riot. Or the next.
Of course there are some factors that make for more explosive ingredients. The drive to war with potential conscription adds another layer as does the worsening economic conditions on the horizon. It’s one thing if living standards decline slowly over time; a continuous plummet over the course of a few years is another.
You can add to that the upcoming violence from the Ukrainian collapse that will almost certainly blow back across Europe. NC regular Ignacio highlights a recent interview of historian Marta Havryshko in which she says “these fa-right combatants are acquiring experience in modern warfare and PTSD. We are there breeding terrorists she says. She believes these guys will start racial wars around Europe. These guys have to be watched and controlled. The PTSD thing is a factor helping the transformation in terrorists.”
Ignacio also notes how the EU ruling class has known this for years but has downplayed it so as to not lend credence to the Russian claims of de-Nazification.
Intelligence agency-backed Nazi terrorists running amok and the threat of war with the evil Russians hanging over the continent like a dark cloud helping to deliver wealth and power upwards and solidify a dependency on the US. Sounds a lot like a rerun of the Years of Lead in Italy.
