Why is Gen Z revolting?

From France to India, young people are taking to the streets over growing inequality, failing public services and bleak prospects for the future.

We are currently experiencing a wave of protests across Europe and beyond. Many have been dubbed “Gen Z protests”, with young people aged roughly 13 to 29 leading demonstrations over issues that particularly affect their generation.

In France, protests started several weeks ago over deteriorating conditions in severely underfunded schools. They have been growing in strength, with between half a million and 800,000 protesters reportedly taking part in them across the country last weekend.

In India, the Cockroach movement has emerged as the strongest challenge to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s increasingly authoritarian leadership. Last week, its leader was arrested as anger grew over the removal of more than 130 million names from electoral rolls.

In Spain, anger has arisen over a broken housing system and laws that fail to protect households against eviction. First there was the forcible eviction of 87-year-old Maricarmen Abascal. Then parliament voted down widely popular legislation that would protect households against evictions, prompting Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez to call snap elections. Maricarmen died two weeks after her eviction.

While the context in each country is different, grievances over inequality are at the centre of the current protest wave. This inequality has two aspects. One is about class and one is about generation.

Across Europe, inequality has increased significantly since the 2008 crisis. This can be seen in growing income inequality and spiralling wealth inequality. The effect on people’s lives is worsened by the erosion of the once-proud European welfare states. High-quality public services for all were once meant to offer a guaranteed minimum standard of living and a meritocracy in which everyone had the chance to succeed. But years of austerity have eroded the state’s capacity to deliver good education, healthcare, social care and other services. The gradual retreat of the state exacerbates growing income and wealth inequalities, as some can pay for better services while many cannot.

These growing inequalities are often felt more acutely by young people and are compounded by other challenges they face. In one area after another, young people are experiencing failures in governance that give them a bleaker outlook and much worse prospects than their parents and grandparents had.

Underfunded education systems have no doubt played a significant part in the sharp decline in reading and maths skills laid bare by the most recent PISA results. A common explanation for this decline is worsening mental health and associated school absences, with social media often cited as a contributing factor.

Another driver of declining educational attainment is the rapidly increasing use of AI. These are governance failures of another kind. Efforts to regulate both social media and AI have been slow and hampered by strong lobbying from tech giants.

The AI revolution also affects young people as they seek to establish themselves in the labour market. While AI’s impact on employment is still in its infancy, it is already clear that entry-level work in particular is increasingly being done by machines.

Housing is another essential aspect of life in which young people are disadvantaged. Today’s young people spend a much higher proportion of their income on rent than any previous generation did. This is, again, a failure of governance.

On top of all this comes the climate crisis, which perhaps represents the largest governance failure of them all. The latest IPCC report illustrates starkly how much more precarious life will be for those born in 2020 than for their parents and grandparents.

More equal societies would be much better placed to withstand the instability that climate change brings as they would offer collective forms of adaptation. Instead, the increasingly unequal societies we now see will put the burden of adaptation on individuals and households.

In other words, multiple governance failures and the erosion of state capacity have created an explosive situation for young people. This is the anger being expressed on the streets of Paris, New Delhi, Rome and Madrid.

Predictably, the main government response has been repression. This follows a global trend of criminalising and repressing protest. Whether through anti-protest laws, arrests or police violence, repression is on the rise. Repression sometimes succeeds in killing off protest movements. At other times, it instead inflames them. That has certainly been the case in both France and India so far.

What is really needed are genuine efforts to address the inequalities and governance failures that motivate young people to take to the streets. Without them, political crises are bound to ensue.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.