French students are up to their old tricks again. By this, of course, I mean rioting and burning buildings. When you get right down to it, what else is an education really good for anyways?
This time around the alleged cause are proposed cuts to education funding as part of wider budget cuts by President Emmanuel Macron’s government to rein in France’s out of control public expenditures. In 2025, the government deficit was over €128 billion (C$204.6 billion), or 5.1 per cent of GDP. Projected to rise to 5.4 per cent of GDP in 2026, the €43 billion ($68.7 billion) in proposed cuts for 2027 are designed to reduce the deficit to five per cent of GDP next year. For context, the Canadian government general deficit stands at around 2.5 per cent of GDP . All this is to say that France has a spending problem it must control, and the proposed budget is a first step down that road.
Unions and the students were, however, having none of it. On Tuesday, 300,000 protesters across France took to the streets to protest for higher wages for public sector workers. Things got ugly quickly, especially at the high schools.
The numbers are staggering by any measure: 1,027 buildings vandalized, 1,949 young people arrested. Images of burning dumpsters and schools in flames are dominating media coverage. The Minister of National Education said on X that the violence committed was “of an extremely serious nature,” and called on those responsible to be prosecuted. He further added that “Everyone needed to consider their responsibility in calling for this mobilisation” in what was surely a thinly veiled reference to French leftists who have distributed guides on how to blockade universities and schools, as well as the socialist France Unbowed party, who have been accused of fueling the violence . The minister ended by saying that “violence will not stop the fundamental right our students have to education.”
All this is occuring in the context of a France that is preparing for presidential elections in May of 2027. The mood is heated and polarized and the student riots have poured gasoline on an already raging fire.
On the right, presidential candidate Marine Le Pen of the National Rally was swift to condemn the rioting, saying that when violence becomes a political tool, “everyone’s liberty is threatened.” Her message and movement seem to be resonating with a French public fed up with what they view as a society out of control. Prior to the rioting, Le Pen was widening her lead in early presidential polls.
Clearly, however, not everyone agrees with Le Pen. Her possible presidential opponent from the left, firebrand Jean-Luc Mélanchon of France Unbowed — who has never seen a protest or riot he didn’t want to join — has come down on the side of the student vandals, who he believes were “ provoked ” by the government.
On X he spoke of his concern for the “ police violence ” against “young people” as though the police had randomly attacked students out for a stroll. Not content with simply supporting the burning of French schools in the name of his imagined democracy, Mélanchon went further, accusing Le Pen of causing the problem and getting her “friends in the police” to beat up the students. The France Unbowed mayor of Saint-Denis, just north of Paris, Bally Bagayoko, echoed the Mélanchon’s general sentiment and expressed his sympathy for the student protesters’ “ legitimate violence .” Le Pen, for her part, has shot back, accusing Mélanchon and other members of France Unbowed of fomenting and organizing the violence. If you think the United States has divisive and fiery rhetoric, you ain’t seen nothin’ compared to Mélanchon and his band of communists wannabes.
The 2027 French presidential elections have the potential to be of seismic importance for Europe. Following the German state electoral success of the AfD, Europe has been gripped with fear of a “far right” resurgence. More centrist French politicians have tried to pretend that the populist movements they abhor are a phenomenon of other countries. Not so. As in many other western countries, there is a sense that governments are not serving the average voter and something needs to change. In France, on top of the debt, economic growth is nearly non-existent, projected to be only 0.4 per cent in 2026.
Voters want something, anything, different. Right now, that is manifesting in voters breaking either right to Marine Le Pen or left to Jean-Luc Mélanchon. That highly polarized and volatile scenario will define the 2027 presidential race. Expect more political fireworks as well as fires in the streets of France as election day nears.
Adam Pankratz is a lecturer at the University of British Columbia’s Sauder School of Business.
