French student protests widen as PM alleges political manipulation

Fresh demonstrations are planned in hundreds of locations across France on Saturday, with student protesters expected to be joined by trade unions and prominent figures from the gilets jaunes movement. Jérôme Rodrigues, a well-known yellow-vest activist, used Instagram to urge people to turn out, arguing that the protests give a voice to those who want to live decently and no longer choose between eating and driving. He also said that anger, and an empty fridge, belong to no political party. The yellow vests staged more than a year of demonstrations against cost-of-living increases from 2018, becoming one of the longest-running protest movements in French history.

The unrest has collided with a charged political calendar. Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu said this week that student anger was being manipulated, and on Wednesday accused members of Jean-Luc Mélenchon's France Insoumise of instrumentalising the high school movement for electoral advantage — encouraging protests and then going through the motions of condemning violence, which he called hypocrisy that damages France. Mélenchon is a presidential hopeful, and chants of 'Mélenchon for President!' are common at student marches. Demonstrators cited his support for a wealth tax, lowering the voting age to 16, and his being the only candidate to visit schools to inspect their condition; Marine Le Pen, the nationalist anti-immigration frontrunner, has proposed cutting France's €11bn contribution to the EU budget instead.

Underneath the street politics sits a fiscal squeeze. France faces high government borrowing costs, a parliament split into three opposing blocs and six prime ministers in five years, all promising to cut public debt. Economist Anne-Laure Delatte, a CNRS tenured researcher at Paris Dauphine University, told the BBC that comparisons with Greece in 2012 or Argentina in 2001 do not hold, and that the closest parallel is Britain under Liz Truss in 2023. She said markets already recognised after the 2024 snap elections that France had a budgetary problem, but also know it is a large country able to raise taxes — noting that a 4% VAT increase would raise the €120bn needed, and that the European Central Bank would likely step in if French finances threatened other European economies.

The protests themselves are rooted in everyday grievances. In Paris's 3rd district, 17-year-olds Maxime, Madeleine and Elodie told the BBC they were blocking their school entrance over holes in classroom walls, swelling class sizes and a shortage of teachers, while saying conditions are far worse in the capital's disadvantaged suburbs. They described a gap between France's motto of liberté, égalité, fraternité and the reality they see, and said large-scale protests seemed the only way to be heard. None of them will be old enough to vote in the spring election.

The demonstrations have also been marked by claims of police violence, which the interior ministry denies. Hundreds were injured during protests earlier this month, and a 15-year-old boy in the town of Lens lost a hand; the interior minister has since suspended the use of stun grenades by police at high school demonstrations. Gwen, 37, one of a group of mothers wearing 'Mums in solidarity' placards, said parents take turns each morning co-ordinating between students and police at their local school lock-in, and that her son's missed school time is outweighed by learning civic duty.

Marchers have drawn a direct line to May 1968, when student demands in Paris inspired workers to join what became France's biggest general strike; 17-year-old Lola, sharing a placard with her mother Sandrine, said her mother took to the streets in 1968 and that there is no point waiting for the election. The unrest is unfolding as several European countries confront ageing populations, costly welfare states and external pressures including US President Donald Trump's trade tariffs and the war in the Persian Gulf. Economists and politicians alike question whether any new French president, from the left or the right, can break the impasse over the country's finances.