Mass student and Gen Z-led protests over school conditions, housing costs, education funding, and the cost of living have swept France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Belgium, Greece, and Albania.
The irony is hard to miss. Many of the same cohorts spent years demanding open borders and an aggressive renewable-energy transition. Now they are protesting the consequences.
It is easy to dismiss this as a European problem, but the harbingers of social unrest are all too obvious here in Australia and indeed the Anglosphere.
Mass immigration has eroded social cohesion as extreme leftist immigrants, through sheer numbers, take advantage of political unrest.
Vulnerable areas with high concentrations of migrant-background residents have been linked to gang influence and elevated crime. Sweden experienced a sharp rise in gun violence associated with migrant-heavy criminal networks before later crackdowns reduced shootings.
Similar patterns of second-generation involvement appear in reports on the disorder from Milan and other parts of Europe. Further, German and Italian officials have explicitly linked elements of recent violence to left-wing groups and migrant-background youth.
At the same time, the push for Net Zero through heavily subsidised renewables has helped drive Europe into a cost-of-living crisis. Higher energy prices raise production costs across every sector.
Reports by McKinsey, the German Chambers of Industry and Commerce, and KfW/Prognos all point to multi-trillion-euro cumulative costs and a sharp rise in the annual investment required just to keep Germany’s current transition pathway on track.
Higher energy costs drive higher living costs. The pattern is similar across much of Europe.
Students demanded both policies. Both have contributed to the unrest and economic stress they are now protesting.
Socialism does not work. It never has. Yet that is precisely the direction many students have been steered – destroy capitalism, redistribute wealth, and then wonder why the system produces less of everything.
The result is not an Arab Spring but a European Winter of lower growth, higher costs, and declining social cohesion.
For decades, large parts of the education system have treated socialist premises as the default. What was once a minority view among academics has become closer to orthodoxy. Students absorb the idea that redistribution solves problems and that individual incentives do not matter, then express surprise when the results disappoint.
The US, UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand all took up Europe’s ‘Refugees Welcome’ posture. Geography protected the Anglosphere from the full scale of irregular arrivals that Europe faced, but the policy instinct was the same. Only President Trump has treated the issue as a practical problem rather than a moral slogan.
The students propose more redistribution to offset the cost-of-living crisis. But this runs into an historical constraint. Government is inefficient at producing goods and services because its job is not to maximise output or profit, but to set the rules and protect the public interest.
Businesses, for all their faults, innovate because they are rewarded for doing so. These functions are mutually exclusive. Nothing motivates sustained effort like individual gain from individual work.
Most students dislike group assignments because they know the pattern. There is always a leaner who relies on the lifter, yet both receive the same grade. Socialism is that arrangement scaled to an entire economy. Eventually the lifters stop lifting. The leaners then demand that government squeeze more from a shrinking base.
Students should know this, but they have been hoodwinked by an education system that forgot the foundational ideas of the Enlightenment. A liberal education has become some warped socialist indoctrination process that Europeans have taken up with gusto.
Now the lifters are refusing to lift. The leaners want to squeeze blood out of the government stone.
It’s a collective form of cognitive dissonance.
In practice, protests over education access, healthcare, and living costs have been joined or overtaken by left-wing activists and migrant-background groups, producing riots and looting. The same pattern is visible, in milder form, in parts of the Anglosphere.
Australia is not immune. Pressure is already building on the Labor government, and on Treasurer Jim Chalmers in particular. With the Prime Minister still offering his standard line that he does not discuss domestic policy while overseas, the question is whether there will be a change in policy or a change in government. Perhaps only the latter will do.
The situation in Europe demands not just a rethink on our immigration and energy policies, but also our education system.
The unrealistic expectations that teachers and academics have inculcated in our students must stop before it is too late. You can’t have your cake and eat it too.
Dr Michael de Percy @FlaneurPolitiq is the Spectator Australia’s Canberra Press Gallery Correspondent. If you’d like to support his writing, please shout him a drink over at Donorbox.
