The Specter of Lepenism Looms Over France’s Social Crisis

Student demonstrators in France gained a second wind this weekend, joining cost-of-living demonstrations on Saturday in a significant escalation of the country’s social crisis. Thoroughfares in French cities large and small, from Paris to Limoges, were filled with as many as 800,000 people, according to organizers.

State intelligence services underestimated the level of participation, as impromptu marches crisscrossing city centers were able to overwhelm police forces. There were more than 2,000 arrests reported across the country over hours of heated clashes that saw the burning of public buildings and the ransacking of private businesses like luxury retail stores in Paris and Bordeaux. Though the vast majority of protesters were peaceful, some violent demonstrators did engage in acts of vandalism, like the burning of the neo-Renaissance city hall building in Limoges. As of Sunday, 500 people were still in police custody in the capital alone.

“How can French people do this to France?” said President Emmanuel Macron on Sunday evening, responding to the weekend’s rioting in a televised address. Blaming “ultra-left groupings” and “delinquents,” the president offered little in the way of major policy announcements, indicating instead that police prefects would be encouraged to consider strict protest bans.

The convergence between students and this weekend’s marches was not surprising. A segregated, underfunded education system is only one of the many grievances bringing French high school and university students out in force. From artificial intelligence and climate change to diminishing expectations over an uncertain future, they are calling attention to many of the demands heard in youth-led movements like Spain’s recent housing protests, anti-conscription demonstrations in Germany, and India’s so-called “cockroach” movement.

For many, it’s also a political coming of age.

The impasse is only exacerbated by growing fears over the trajectory of French politics, which after a decade under President Emmanuel Macron has seen the far right make considerable gains in both institutional and cultural power. Going from vocal outsiders to insider kingmakers, Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National is in many respects already setting the agenda when it comes to immigration, Islam, and the demonization of progressives. The imminent risk today is the all-too-possible scenario of a far-right victory in the spring 2027 presidential elections.

To some, it’s a sign of the movement’s hijacking by the left: Many students have made no mystery of their fears of where the normalization of Le Pen is taking the country they’re inheriting.

“The ideas of the far right are becoming mainstream while those who denounce the country’s slide into fascism are being discredited,” Soumaya Sarré told The Nation. Sarré is the spokesperson for the Fédération Lycéenne des Quartiers, a collective established in Saint-Denis in early October that seeks to represent the specific needs of students in the working-class and ethnically diverse banlieues.

Saturday’s marches were again filled with protesters chanting antifascist slogans and carrying banners denouncing the rise of the far right. The chorus from a 1985 punk anthem, “Porcherie” (“Pigsty”)—“the youth shit on the National Front”—remains a staple today, and has been heard at marches and occupations since the student movement began in September. The Front National, founded in the 1970s by Marine Le Pen’s father, Jean-Marie, was rebranded as the Rassemblement National (National Rally) in 2018.

“The situation is already bad, but we know that if the Rassemblement National wins, it will be even worse,” said Marius Mesnil, co–general secretary of the Union Syndicale Lycéenne. “We know they won’t do anything to fight the racism plaguing the police. In fact they’ll only encourage it,” he added. “What the RN wants is more leeway for the police, more weapons, and even harsher crackdowns.”

The threat of far-right rule is more real now than ever. All opinion polling shows Le Pen towering above her rivals in the April 18 first-round vote, often by double-digit leads. These predictions remain hypothetical, but in possible second-round face-offs, the prognosis is just as grim: Le Pen, a four-time presidential candidate, maintains an advantage over every possible contender.

France’s student revolt highlights a generational rift. Many of the young, first-time, and future voters who have demonstrated in recent weeks are at odds with a voting population that skews in favor of older, more right-wing citizens. Conservative media have tried to turn right-wing influencers into representatives of a supposedly dormant thirst for order among French youth. “Rioters once again ruined the October 17 protests in defense of purchasing power,” argued Marine Le Pen in a social-media post on Saturday.

Yet young French people are considerably less on board with the idea of a Le Pen presidency than their elders. Upwards of 49 percent of voters between the ages of 18 and 24 are estimated to support the leader of the left-wing party La France Insoumise, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, even if a still-considerable 28 percent favor Le Pen.

“I’m not sure whether this movement will amount to a political revolution,” said Mesnil. He nonetheless points to a recent study suggesting that 80 percent of young people intend to vote in the next presidential election, potentially bucking the trend in an age group usually marked by high rates of abstention. “This movement has significantly politicized young people,” Mesnil said, holding out hope that “this could potentially translate into institutional change in 2027.”

But the risk remains that they’re speaking into a vacuum.

“Support for the student movement is very weak among the right-wing electorate and elderly voters,” said Gilles Ivaldi, a political scientist and expert on the far right. “The Rassemblement National’s calls to restore order through things like a new ‘rioters-pay’ law are appeals to that base.”

He continued: “Retirees are the largest pool of voters and are the electorate that votes the most consistently. This generational divide is not new. A growing problem in France is that politics is increasingly being made by and for elderly people.”

In keeping with its law-and-order mantra, Le Pen’s party distanced itself from this fall’s protests from the beginning. It has played off the reduction of the demonstrations to an outburst of violence in the banlieues, castigating the outgoing Macronists for laxism. Speaking from Madrid on October 13, on the third day of countrywide student marches, Rassemblement National president Jordan Bardella called for an immediate end to protests and for tougher legal penalties against minors.

Le Pen is also likely counting on the coming presidential election to curb frustrations that have led to the ongoing cascade of occupations, protests, and rioting. “French people can no longer bear being trapped between state austerity and tax bludgeoning on the one hand and insurrectionist activists on the other. They must hold on for a few more months,” Le Pen wrote on the social-media platform X.

“The malaise in France has reached such depths that while it’s now spilling out onto the streets, it will definitely be reflected in the voting booths come April,” said Ivaldi, who teaches at Sciences Po. Between its rigid “security”-obsessed platform and its proposals to address the cost-of-living crisis by slashing payroll charges and sales taxes, the RN hopes to be seen as a firm party of order for a country trapped in a cycle of economic decline and social unrest.

For now, the perception of the ongoing demonstrations maps onto the country’s preexisting political divides.

The absence of widespread outrage at the scale of the police clampdown on this fall’s protests is itself revelatory of the climate induced by Le Pen’s rise. Ubiquitous images of brutal riot police interventions, and even accounts of sexual harassment endured by detained protesters, are being drowned out in a country that is growing accustomed to violence.

Right-wingers can point to studies claiming that nearly three-quarters of the public favor doing away with underage protections for rioting infractions. Still, other opinion polls suggest that some 55 percent of the broader population approve of the student marches, with 72 percent looking favorably on the protesters’ demands.

“October 17 came at just the right time,” said Sarré. “The high school movement can bring other causes and sectors together, like the ‘yellow vests,’ railway workers, and farmers. This convergence can only amplify our voices.”

But Le Pen’s appeal as a rampart against disorder also has receptive listeners, especially in a media ecosystem and political class drifting toward the hard right. Nowhere is this slide more evident than in the designation of La France Insoumise as the bête noire of the ongoing unrest. “Mélenchon has turned these young people into enemies of everything and everyone,” Le Pen said on October 15. The investigative news outlet Le Canard enchaîné reported on October 13 that the Macronist prime minister, Sébastien Lecornu, pushed for criminal prosecutions for “inciting rebellion” against Mélenchon and party leaders. “I don’t know who will hear me given the circumstances, but my message is clear: Those who share our struggle have no place in looting and vandalism,” said Mélenchon on Sunday, in an implicit recognition of the party’s isolation.

Between Le Pen and the Macronist center, a shared front against social unrest has the advantage of distracting from the meager responses to protesters’ material demands. Education Minister Edouard Geffray announced an “emergency plan” that students and teachers have widely derided as insufficient. Seriously answering popular outrage over declining living standards is anathema for a government otherwise fixated on containing the budget deficit, which at 5.4 percent of GDP is the highest in the eurozone.

Le Pen’s party is equally eager to come across as guardians of fiscal discipline. This month, the Rassemblement National presented the outlines of its budget plan, widely criticized by economists, that calls for draconian DOGE-style cuts worth up to €140 billion by 2032. Le Pen has also promised the creation of a constitutional “brake” on deficit spending. As financial markets grow increasingly restless about France’s budget woes, she wants to send the message that a far-right government would be responsible toward creditors.

Students and cost-of-living protesters have set themselves the unenviable task of defying the laws of political gravity now at work in the country. As one widely used slogan for the October 17 demonstration put it, “It’s time to break out of the contemporary world.”