After COP30, Indigenous Narratives Are More Important Than Ever

By Nick Engelfried

December 23, 2025

Source: Waging Non-violence

Image by If Not Us Then Who?

As last month’s COP30 climate negotiations unfolded in Belém, Brazil, activists converged on the city to advocate for keeping fossil fuels in the ground and protecting carbon-rich ecosystems. At the center of large public demonstrations in Belém were an unprecedented number of people from Indigenous, Afro-descendant and other communities with deep ties to traditional lands.

COP30 stood out from other recent U.N. climate summits, partly because of the key role Indigenous representatives played. It also featured large protests after three successive years of the annual COP summits being held in countries whose governments are friendly to fossil fuels and hostile to dissent. 

“For the first time since 2021, we saw major climate protests inside and outside COP,” said Yurshell Rodríguez, who attended as a member of the Indigenous and community-led group If Not Us Then Who? “Indigenous delegates were there not just to participate, but to lead.”

In all, more than 900 representatives of Indigenous nations and Indigenous-led groups attended COP30 as registered participants, while thousands more advocated outside the negotiations. At least 385 distinct Indigenous nations were represented, including over 300 from Brazil alone.

Under President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Brazil has projected the image of a country eager to lead on climate and sympathetic to demands from its Indigenous population. Brazil’s Minister for Indigenous Peoples, Sônia Guajajara, played a key part in COP30. Partly as a result, activists had high hopes that the summit might lead to breakthroughs for global recognition of Indigenous land rights.

Not all these hopes were realized. However, events at COP30 showed that the role of Indigenous peoples as defenders of Earth’s climate is gaining widespread recognition, despite the slow rate of progress toward returning lands to Indigenous control.  

“Social movements are connecting dots the official COP negotiations avoid,” Rodríguez said. “Our message is clear: You want climate solutions? You need us.”

Centering Indigenous voices 

Rodríguez’s path to attending COP30 began when she was growing up in Colombia. Home to around 10 percent of Earth’s biodiversity and the third largest expanse of Amazon rainforest, Colombia is also at the center of centuries-old struggles against colonization. Rodríguez, who belongs to Colombia’s Afro-Indigenous Raizal ethnic group, grew concerned at an early age about how extractive industries endanger both communities and Earth’s climate. 

In 2018, Rodríguez was one of 25 young plaintiffs in a groundbreaking lawsuit that led Colombia’s highest court to rule that the government must do more to curb deforestation. Over the next few years, she attended COP climate summits in Madrid, Glasgow and Sharm el Sheikh, Egypt. She also became a trainer for If Not Us Then Who?, which seeks to elevate Indigenous voices in conversations about climate change.

“Sometimes protecting nature looks like resistance,” Rodríguez said. “It looks like communities confronting governments that want to exploit their land and forests.”

Rodríguez’s work brought her to the attention of Health In Harmony, an international non-governmental organization that supports community-focused efforts to protect rainforests in tropical countries. The organization was looking for ways to communicate the importance of this work while uplifting communities with ties to land.

“We realized community stories needed to be at the front of the climate narrative, because climate science just goes right over many people’s heads and governments are failing to make good on their commitments,” said Ashley Emerson, who oversees Health In Harmony’s international programs. 

Rodríguez got involved in Health In Harmony’s Community Thriving Narratives project, which sought to put technology and storytelling tools directly in the hands of communities in Panama. With support from the FSC Indigenous Foundation and Ulu Films, Rodríguez led multiple three-day trainings in Panama’s Darién province. Over 40 people attended, practicing skills like video and audio recording, smartphone filming and using editing software.

Central to this project was the idea that Indigenous peoples and other marginalized groups should have “narrative sovereignty,” telling their own stories without having to go through intermediaries. 

“Having an Indigenous person who’s experienced similar struggles lead the training is important,” Rodríguez said. “Being an Afro-Indigenous woman myself means I can help people feel safer, respected and seen.”

The original plan for the project in Darién Province was to document traditional practices like face painting, language preservation and water management. But then things took an unexpected turn.

In March, Panama’s government passed the controversial Law 462, which changes the country’s Social Security Fund, opening the door to privatization and putting thousands of pensions at risk. This directly affected communities with whom Rodríguez was working.

“At that point, they decided to document this current reality,” Rodríguez said.

That pivot toward focusing on an ongoing policy crisis reflects an important truth: Solutions to climate change involve not just regulating emissions, but protecting the well-being of communities whose roots to a place make them the best defenders of ecosystems.

Resisting threats 

“Sometimes protecting the forest means resisting the systems that are harming it,” Rodríguez said. This can entail fighting back against policies like Panama’s Law 462. 

In the spring, people in Darién Province and throughout Panama mobilized to protest the new law with marches, a teachers’ strike and nonviolent road blockades. National Police responded by firing pellets and tear gas at protesters and imprisoning community leaders. While Law 462 remains in place, community leaders remain determined to push for its repeal.

Rodríguez worked with Darién residents to make short films documenting the violence and other challenges they face. The videos are available on YouTube, and their creators hope disseminating them on social media will help draw worldwide attention to the struggles in Darién Province. 

International organizations like Health In Harmony have also mobilized to support Panamanian activists. 

“We used our platforms to raise funds for areas that face food shortages from disruptions caused by the police violence,” Emerson said.

Indigenous leaders’ calls for climate justice at COP30 were similarly entwined with concerns about threats to their communities, both from resource extraction and violence against those who speak out. According to advocacy group Global Witness, 146 land defenders around the world were killed or disappeared last year alone. 

During one COP30 protest, members of Brazil’s Indigenous Munduruku Nation blockaded the main entrance to the part of the conference where official negotiations took place, to peacefully protest extractive activities on Munduruku lands. Despite such actions, COP30 concluded with no roadmap to phase out fossil fuel use or deforestation — but outside the main negotiations, countries announced some significant new programs. These include an international fund launched by Brazil to help developing countries protect tropical forests, which aims to raise $25 billion.

Fifteen governments also announced an Intergovernmental Land Tenure Commitment, part of a global effort to recognize and protect 160 million hectares of Indigenous and community-held lands by 2030. Questions remain about how national governments will make good on this promise. However, if they follow through, COP30 could represent a turning point toward greater recognition of Indigenous land rights.

Land defenders are prepared to hold governments accountable, in part by elevating the voices of those who stand up to extractive industries.

“We are working to build and strengthen a continental network of Indigenous and Afro-descendant storytellers,” said Rodríguez. 

As part of this effort, Health In Harmony and If Not Us Then Who? are looking to spread the Community Thriving Narratives model beyond Panama. Brazil, whose vibrant Indigenous and land-based movements helped set the tone at COP30, is one likely area for expansion.

“Our long-term vision is simple,” Rodríguez said. “Restore narrative sovereignty, amplify frontline voices, and shift global climate conversations toward justice and self-determination.”Email

Nick Engelfried

Nick Engelfried is an environmental writer, educator, and activist living in the Pacific Northwest. He is the author of "Movement Makers: How Young Activists Upended the Politics of Climate Change."

Portugal’s General Strike

By Irina Castro, Catarina Príncipe 

December 23, 2025

Source: Jacobin

Image by JetPereira/Wikimediacommons, licensed via CC BY 0.0

December 11 saw a massive general strike in Portugal. This was not just a workplace dispute but a political strike, directed against the government’s planned labor reform.

Trade unions widely see this as a devaluation of labor and a profound attack on labor rights — in short, a class offensive. The massive participation in the strike shows that workers felt this way too.

Austerity Years

The bill, often referred to as the labor reform package, was proposed by the current right-wing government, which unites the Social Democratic Party (PSD) and the CDS–People’s Party (CDS-PP). It introduces over one hundred regressive amendments to labor law, clearly aimed at shifting the balance of power in favor of employers.

These measures were neither presented nor debated during this spring’s general electoral campaign. They represent a deliberate rollback of labor rights, reviving and deepening the offensive launched during the Portuguese sovereign debt crisis (2010–14), also overseen by a PSD-CDS government.

Since 2010, there have been frequent revisions to the labor law. Indeed, we can divide the last decade and a half into two major periods. First were the austerity years, with cuts in public spending, tax hikes, and the privatization of strategic sectors. This moment also included the memorandum of understanding with the troika, made up of the European Central Bank, the European Commission, and the International Monetary Fund. All this contributed to the consolidation of a neoliberal economic and labor regime. Then came the post-troika period, initially characterized by Socialist-led governments with left-wing support, in the so-called “contraption” (geringonça) arrangement. It sought to restore wages and pensions cut during austerity and to address labor precarity.

During the austerity phase, labor legislation worsened significantly. Measures incorporated into the labor law sought to reduce labor costs, particularly by making it easier to dismiss workers and also cheaper, through changing the system of compensation for contract terminations. At the same time, efforts were made to weaken collective bargaining by facilitating the expiration of agreements and to make working time more flexible through changes to overtime and holidays.

Yet this austerity era did not last unchanged. Rather, for almost a decade, with a government initially supported by a left-wing parliamentary majority (2015–2022) and later by the Socialist Party alone (2022–24), the austerity-era labor law was partially revised, particularly in areas such as wages, parental rights, and social protection. These revisions were, however, restrained, partly restoring some of the rights removed during the 2010–15 period but without structurally changing the architecture of the austerity-era neoliberal labor reform. During the pandemic, legislative changes focused primarily on regulating remote work and strengthening rights related to combining work and family life. These measures formed part of the initial steps of the so-called Decent Work Agenda, promoted during the Socialist Party’s majority government, which also sought to combat bogus self-employment and to advance the regulation of work on digital platforms.

Renewed Offensive

However, in March 2024, the PSD-CDS duo returned to government following the general election. This coalition then launched an attack aimed at resuming the austerity-era offensive while also seeking to reverse some of the gains achieved in the meantime. In the current labor reform package, solutions previously challenged and blocked by social and trade union mobilization, notably during the general strikes of 2010, 2011, and 2013, have reappeared. These include the expansion of discretionary forms of dismissal, the reduction of requirements for material justification, and the weakening of guarantees associated with collective bargaining, trade union rights, and the right to strike. In short, while the troika’s intervention focused primarily on the material cost of dismissals — changes that were largely never reversed — the current proposals seek to alter the basic architecture of employment protection guarantees to benefit employers.

While the Troika’s measures weakened collective bargaining by making it easier for agreements to expire, the current proposal erodes union rights further. Moreover, the proposal to broaden unions’ minimum service obligations during strikes is a direct attack on workers’ most powerful instrument of struggle. By extending these obligations from established essential services (schools, hospitals, transport) to additional sectors (schools and nurseries, care homes and social-care institutions, food-supply services, and private security) the labor reform package effectively hollows out the right to strike. It reduces it to a formal right without material force.

The troika established a so-called cheap flexibility framework, which the current proposal takes further. It also extends the duration of fixed-term and open-ended contracts with uncertain conditions and multiplies “atypical” forms of employment (such as intermittent and temporary work), making it increasingly difficult to secure a stable employment relationship. These measures seek to ensure a more efficient management of labor from the employer’s perspective and to use the lack of permanent status to discipline workers.

The main novelty in comparison with the troika period lies in the attack on the limited reforms implemented between 2015 and 2024, particularly with regard to digital platform work. The government proposal is likely to affect a much larger number of platform workers by making it more difficult for them to be recognized as employees. Rather than strengthening the presumption that this is indeed an employment relationship, it raises the threshold for such recognition. This would allow many couriers, drivers, and other gig-economy workers to continue to be classified as self-employed.

There is, however, a significant difference between the two moments. The reform imposed by the troika took place in a context of acute economic crisis, associated with the European sovereign debt crisis. The current reform is presented at a time when the Portuguese economy shows signs of growth, stability, and improvement per several macroeconomic indicators. This raises the question: what justifies such a deep attack on labor rights in this context? Beyond the ideological orientation of the current government, which has consistently advocated a shift in the balance of power from labor toward capital, it is also necessary to consider the framework associated with the European postpandemic recovery plan, NextGenerationEU. Such spending is largely implemented through the Recovery and Resilience Facility, which finances EU member states following the approval of their respective recovery and resilience plans. Access to these funds is subject to conditionalities, including structural reforms aimed at so-called economic modernization, the promotion of competitiveness, the green transition, and digitalization.

With the current labor reform package, the logic of state modernization, based on the digitalization of economic activity, underpins a significant part of the proposed measures. These are based on the idea that digitalization constitutes a new economic model, the emergence of a new labor market characterized by new productive processes, new forms of business organization, and new products and services. It is assumed that the current labor law is not friendly to these transformations, thereby justifying its rewriting in a manner more favorable to business interests.

General Strike

The December 11 general strike was the first in twelve years. Since 1974, Portugal has experienced eleven such actions (including the current one). The 2025 strike is one of only three that were jointly called by the two main interunion confederations: the General Confederations of the Portuguese Unions (CGTP), traditionally linked to the Communist Party, and the General Union of Workers (UGT), historically linked to the Socialist Party.

In the past, Portugal has seen very high levels of disruption during general strikes, with widespread work stoppages and a significant paralysis of economic and social activity. Although union membership has followed a long-term downward trend since the mid-1970s, particularly in the private sector, the capacity of general strikes to mobilize workers has not been fundamentally compromised.

According to publicly available data, Portugal’s active workforce is estimated at between 5.3 and 5.4 million people. Moreover, although the majority of workers are formally employed within the regulated labor market, a share of economic activity remains informal, particularly in sectors such as hospitality and construction, where casual and undeclared work is more prevalent in contrast to formal employment. According to trade unions, the December 11 general strike mobilized around three million workers, in a country of under eleven million people. It is not, however, possible to precisely determine the relative weight of public and private sector involvement. Still, an analysis of daily union reports points to strong participation in the private sector, including the closures of supermarkets, shops, industrial units, and other workplaces. According to both the CGTP and the UGT, this was one of the largest strikes in Portugal’s recent history. Union data indicate participation rates of around 90 percent in many hospitals, while in urban and interregional transport the impact was particularly strong, with the Lisbon Metro completely shut down.

In the private sector, participation was more uneven but still significant, especially among unionized workers and those covered by collective agreements. Lower levels of participation were particularly evident in highly precarious sectors and in subcontracting chains. In banking and insurance, according to the UGT, participation was substantial, as it was in energy, waste, and water services, which operated exclusively under minimum service regimes. The sectors with the lowest participation rates were cleaning, private security, hospitality and food services, and outsourced services, where fear of retaliation remains widespread.

In the public sector, the strike was more visible and more uniform. Unions estimate participation at around 60 percent overall, with particularly strong involvement among administrative and operational staff. In education, nonteaching staff joined the strike in large numbers, shuttering many public schools. In several regions, unions estimate participation of between 70 and 100 percent.

The government and employer organizations offered a totally different picture, claiming that participation ranged between 0 and 10 percent of the workforce. In its first statements, the government based its claims on data indicating that the number of ATM transactions had fallen by only 7 percent. These allegations were also supported by the Portuguese Business Confederation (CIP), which supports the planned reform. It used various strategies to counteract and play down the strike, including illegal practices like subcontracting to temp agencies for the strike day. One illustrative example was multinational fashion firm Zara. Some 87 percent of workers at its store in Rossio joined the general strike. After its workers’ union publicly denounced the company’s attempt to replace workers on strike, Zara was forced to dismiss the subcontracted workers used to substitute the strikers.

The Struggle Ahead

The strike’s success is both surprising and hopeful. Given the political context in Portugal (with the Right and far right representing more than two-thirds of MPs) and difficulties for left-wing parties, the fact that trade unions were able to organize a strike with such massive participation opens a path for new struggles and gives the Left some strategic perspective for the moments ahead.

The last general strike organized by both union confederations, in 2013, had also been backed by a social movement organized around growing precarity. Lacking an organizational structure, it sought ways to organize outside of the trade unions. From this position of weakness, the decision was made to organize away from the point of production in a cross-sector alliance of precarious workers. The 2013 general strike happened amid powerful mobilizations, from the anti-precarity movement to the fight against austerity and the troika. Yet this movement has vanished over the last decade.

The economic specialization of the Portuguese economy in tourism and services has added to workers’ precarity. Portugal is today one of the OECD countries with the most precarious labor relations. This affects the capacity for struggle and union organization, as without collective agreements, workers are more vulnerable in the workplace and in their capacity to unionize.

Still, the success of the general strike tells us that labor issues remain central — and that they can mobilize a large share of Portuguese workers. In response, even André Ventura, leader of the far-right Chega, had to change his party’s position on the labor reform package. Having previously promised to back the bill, Chega now denounces the government’s line in a clear effort to retain popularity among workers.

The fact that even unions that have lost members could organize such a large strike in such a difficult political context speaks not only to the government’s brutal attack on labor rights but also to the issues that still inspire many workers. If we are to rebuild a strong political left in Portugal, labor and strengthening the unions will be key.Email

Irina Castro

Irina Castro holds a PhD in governance, knowledge, and innovation from the University of Coimbra. She is a postdoctoral researcher at the Centre for Social Studies and works as a scientific officer.

GenZ 212 movement in Morocco

Tuesday 9 December 2025, by Ismail Manouzi


The youth movement in Morocco is part of the evolution of Moroccan society over almost twenty years, and in particular the difficulties of the workers’ movement and of all resistance forces in their relationship to the power of the state.


In what context did the Generation Z 212 [1] movement emerge?

The context was characterized by high social tension, stemming from the accumulation of popular discontent. The country has experienced unprecedented inflation for the past four years, but anger has remained dormant, failing to erupt into the kind of protests seen in 2006-2007, with the emergence of coordinating committees against the high cost of living. Not forgetting, of course, the deterioration of public services, particularly education and healthcare, and the spread of unemployment, following decades of strict adherence to the directives of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Overall, since the crackdown on the Hirak Rif movement in 2017, the situation has been characterized by the suppression of opportunities for protest and freedom of expression, with strict censorship and the arrest of bloggers and journalists. Popular resistance thus took the form, in 2018, of a boycott campaign targeting the products of several large companies, in protest against rising prices. Among these companies was the oil company owned by the current Prime Minister, one of the country’s wealthiest capitalists, whose net worth is estimated at US$2 billion. The movement of popular struggle min disadvantaged regions, which emerged in the second half of the 1990s and reached its peak in Sidi Ifni in 2005-2008 and in the Rif region in 2016-2017, has lost momentum.

A movement of popular struggle emerged after the earthquake in the Haouz region (in September 2023), but it was repressed and some of its leaders were imprisoned. Given the impact of climate change, many regions now face shortages of drinking water, leading to a resurgence of protests, particularly in rural areas, but these struggles have not been coordinated due to the weakness of leftist forces.

It was then that the Hirak movement in Figuig (November 2023) emerged, in response to a measure aimed at privatizing water services. The country has experienced sectoral struggles led by young people, particularly those of medical students and teachers (often contract workers) and workers in the health sector…

Then came this year’s wave of popular struggles, beginning with the Aït Bouguemez march last July, a two-day trek between the mountains and the city of Azilal, demanding social improvements: education, healthcare, the right to build rural housing, and an end to road and digital isolation. This victorious march marked the start of a wave of similar marches in the region. Simultaneously, other regions experienced popular demonstrations due to the shortage of drinking water (Morocco is experiencing an unprecedented drought that has lasted for 10 years), as well as a popular movement in the city of Taounate , protesting against the widespread deterioration of the social situation. Finally, the Generation Z movement emerged following a demonstration in front of the Agadir Regional Hospital on September 14, 2025, after the deaths of eight women in the hospital’s maternity ward. Due to prolonged austerity in healthcare spending, public hospitals are in such a state of disrepair that they no longer meet the minimum needs of citizens . This is a deliberate policy aimed at diverting citizens from the public sector to the private sector, which has been given free rein and has seen considerable growth, expanding from clinics to large healthcare complexes. The demonstration in Agadir resonated widely on the national level, especially since it was repressed, and that allowed many victims of the public healthcare system to speak out about their tragic situation.

Less than two weeks after the spark in Agadir, the Generation Z movement protest began on September 27, 2025.

That’s the context of the GenZ 212 movement from the perspective of popular social struggle. What about the working-class context?

The Generation Z 212 movement began its struggle three days after the entry into force of a law that effectively outlawed workers’ strikes. The adoption of this law represents a historic defeat for the Moroccan workers’ movement and demonstrates its extreme weakness, which has rendered its influence on young people engaged in the struggle virtually non-existent. Due to the dominance of political forces advocating social peace within the workers’ movement, defeats have followed one after another under the pretext of "social partnership," which involves the state integrating union leaders into all plans aimed at eroding social gains.

Starting with what was called the National Charter for Education and Training, a neoliberal charter (1999) that paved the way for the destruction of the public education service in favour of capital invested in the sector. There was also a restructuring of social protection (health insurance and pensions) according to the same neoliberal logic, and the modification of labour law towards greater job insecurity and the elimination of historical gains, as well as the application of workforce management methods specific to the private sector in the public sector (temporary contracts, increased exploitation, etc.).

Added to this is the inability of the workers’ movement to oppose creeping privatization, the policy of high rates of unemployment, widespread job insecurity, and the repression of union freedoms. Thus, Moroccan law still contains provisions that criminalize strikes (an "obstruction of the freedom to work") and prohibit strikes by civil servants (a law dating from 1958), as well as forbidding strikes by workers involving requisitioning of their workplaces. The policies of union bureaucracies have weakened unions and eroded their credibility, leading to workers’ anger being expressed through sectoral coordinating bodies that have further fragmented and disintegrated the union landscape.

Of course, workers’ resistance continues as a last line of defence (fighting against layoffs, defending union rights, etc.), but it is fragmented, lacking a unified programme of struggle or a clear political horizon. The biggest struggle in this context was the three-month-long strike by education workers (2023-2024) to repel the attack aimed at imposing a statute that would destroy hard-won gains and impose difficult working conditions. This movement was characterized by the emergence of new coordinating bodies that mobilized teachers, including the rank and file of the unions, most of which had supported the Ministry of Education’s plan. The movement achieved a partial victory, with the state abandoning certain provisions of the statute and granting a salary increase unprecedented in the sector’s history, exceeding that obtained during the February 20, 2011 movement. However, this increase did not fully satisfy teachers, as inflation limited its impact. But the absence of a union left prevented the structuring of the base of the movement, as well as the extension of the strike to at least two major sectors of the state which were in turmoil at the time: local authorities (90,000 employees ) and health (80,000 employees ), an extension which could have opened the way to a general strike giving the union movement renewed dynamism and new perspectives.

Instead, union leaders continued their policy of collaboration with the state by accepting the adoption of a law that eliminates the right to strike, while feigning opposition. They also agreed to continue the reform of the pension system, following an initial reform in 2016 (raising the retirement age for civil servants to 63, reducing pensions, and increasing the amount of payroll deductions). Finally, union leaders agreed to modify labour law in the direction of greater flexibility and job insecurity.

These fundamental setbacks have aggravated the crisis of the trade union movement and caused it to lose all respect in the eyes of the working class.

The Moroccan trade union movement was therefore completely taken by surprise by the GenZ 212 movement, while it is in a state of organizational weakness and under the domination of leaders who collaborate with the state, which makes it incapable of supporting the struggle of young people and responding to it as required by the duty to struggle.

The position of union leaders, some guided by reformist or reactionary religious opposition parties, while others are directly subordinate to the palace, is not new: the same approach was followed during the February 20, 2011 movement, and it intensified after the revolution that began in Syria turned into a civil war. At that time, they emphasized safeguarding stability and social peace, exceeding the state’s expectations in this regard. This was confirmed in the face of the Hirak movement in the Rif and the entire wave of popular struggle in neglected regions. Union bureaucracies systematically avoid any convergence between workers’ and popular struggles, in the name of social peace and maintaining stability.

We are therefore far from the example of Madagascar, where the Generation Z movement coordinated via the Internet with the unions to call for national strikes.

What is the social base of the Generation Z 212 movement, what are its demands and what forms does its struggle take?

In the background, there is the social catastrophe that the Covid-19 pandemic brought to the forefront of the political and media scene: more than 4.5 million families need social assistance, hundreds of thousands of jobs have been lost due to the pandemic and successive droughts, public services (especially health) have deteriorated due to decades of austerity and support for the private sector, etc.

The GenZ 212 movement, due to the dynamics linked to its creation and operation, is a movement of young, highly qualified digital activists, graduates of the education system, who are confronted with the reality of the labour market, characterized by high unemployment rates and great job insecurity.

The unemployment rate for 15-24 year olds (the largest segment of Generation Z) reaches 35.8 per cent, and 47 per cent in urban areas. Most jobs offered to young people are extremely precarious, with fixed-term contracts becoming the norm following the widespread use of temporary work and employment agencies. The sectors employing young people are also characterized by overexploitation, as evidenced in particular by the security sector (120,000 employees), call centres (130,000), and electrical wiring for the automotive industry.

Initially, the movement’s demands were of a general social character, lacking precision and a direct political dimension. The movement adopted the slogan "We don’t want the World Cup, health first," widely disseminated by the Agadir protest on September 14, and it demanded reform of the education and health sectors, improved living conditions, and the fight against corruption.

The demand for the government’s removal appeared on October 3, expressing illusions about a superficial change that would not touch the core of neoliberal policy and would only be a false political outcome undermining the struggle dynamic of the Generation Z 212 movement, like the renewal of the superficial government during the February 20, 2011 movement, which had contributed to extinguishing that movement.

After six days of protests, the movement clarified its demands, addressed directly to the king by a list of eight demands: the dismissal of Aziz Akhannouch’s government for failing to protect the purchasing power of Moroccans ; the launch of an impartial judicial process to combat corruption; the dissolution of political parties implicated in corruption; the implementation of the principle of equality and non-discrimination, guaranteeing equal opportunities for young people in health, education, and employment, free from patronage and nepotism; the strengthening of freedom of expression and the right to political dissent; and freedom for all detainees linked to peaceful demonstrations; the release of all prisoners of conscience , participants in popular uprisings and student movements; the organization of a national public accountability session under the auspices of the king.

This document was followed by another, published on October 10th and entitled "List of Demands of Moroccan Youth: For the Activation of the Constitutional Contract and the Realization of the Ambitions of the New Development Model." As its title indicates, it draws on the state’s discourse, beginning with the 2011 Constitution, rejected by the February 20th Movement and the entire political opposition, and the "new development model," governed by a purely neoliberal logic. Even if the demands contained some illusions, they reflected a very broad dynamic of politicization among young people, long considered to be disinterested in politics. This dynamic quickly shattered some of these illusions after the great hopes that the Generation Z 212 movement had placed in the king’s personal intervention. Hopes that the king disappointed in his opening speech to the parliamentary session on October 10th.

Compared to the February 20th Movement of 2011, launched by young people influenced by the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt, the Generation Z 212 movement operates at a lower political level. The two main slogans of the February 20th Movement were: “Freedom, dignity, and social justice” and “The people want the fall of tyranny and corruption.” The young people of GenZ212 retained the first slogan and half of the second, without calling for the fall of tyranny. The February 20th Movement envisioned replacing despotic power with a parliamentary monarchy where the king would reign but not rule. A statement from the GenZ 212 movement, released on Discord on September 18, clarified that the group "clearly affirms that it is not against the monarchy or against the king, but on the contrary, considers the monarchy as an element of stability and continuity of Morocco" and that it demands "radical reform and positive change within the state and its institutions, so that priority is given to education, health, employment and the fight against corruption, so that Moroccan citizens can live in dignity and social justice."

The forms of protest employed by the Generation Z 212 movement consist of street demonstrations, some of which have turned into marches, which have been met with repression and resulted in arrests from the very first day. A major factor fragilizing the movement has been the involvement of the most oppressed groups of young people. These are the young people from the impoverished margins of society, the unemployed, victims of the education system, and victims of the spread of drugs and violence. The towns of Lqliaa and Aït Amira , in the Souss plain, have experienced the most significant acts of vandalism and arson, and the equipment and premises of the security forces have been targeted by masked youths. These cities are working-class neighbourhoods, home to young people from all over the country seeking employment in the Souss plain, which concentrates the majority of the agricultural workforce (70,000 to 100,000) on large capitalist farms, most of whose produce is destined for export. These young people, victims of the violence of an authoritarian capitalist system and its repressive apparatus (105,000 prisoners in Morocco, half of whom are under 30), responded to state violence with predictable vengeful violence that reached its peak on the fifth day, October 1st . Undoubtedly, the nature of the Generation Z movement, whose organization on Discord contrasts sharply with its organization on the ground, fuelled the outbreak of violence, unlike the demonstrations organized in rural areas and those organized by the workers’ movement.

After these acts of violence, from which the Generation Z movement distanced itself, it began to precisely determine the location and duration of its demonstrations in order to avoid the intervention of hooded youths, which led to a decrease in participation in the demonstrations, a sign that this phase of the movement was coming to an end.

What was the regime’s reaction?

Pro-regime media attacked the Generation Z 212 movement with the usual accusations that it was directed from abroad and had objectives hostile to the regime. Marches and rallies were violently dispersed, and numerous arrests were made. The Moroccan Association for Human Rights documented approximately 1,000 arrests, many of whom have since been released. By mid-October, 272 people, including 36 minors, remained in detention, while 221 had been released on bail. Sentences to prison terms and fines continue to be handed down.

In a speech delivered on October 10th, the king stated that "job creation for young people and concrete improvements in the education and health sectors" were priorities, but he did not mention the youth protests or the measures the government would take to achieve these goals.

Then came the communiqué from the royal palace after the meeting of the Council of Ministers (chaired by the king) on October 19, 2025 on the draft finance law for the year 2026, which attempted to highlight the social character of the budget by emphasizing the priority given to the creation of jobs for young people and to increasing the budgets of the health and national education sectors.

The announcement made in this press release will have an immediate calming effect, but its weakness will quickly become apparent given the scale of the population’s social needs and expectations, while the same general policies persist. Similarly, the Minister of Health announced measures and funding for the Agadir regional hospital in the aftermath of the September 14th demonstration, which proved far below what was needed. This is to be expected as long as there is no radical overhaul of the socially destructive neoliberal capitalist policies. Such an overhaul requires a relationship of forces favourable to the working class, in which the GenZ212 movement has played a significant role, but which still remains far from achieving this goal.

What will be the impact of the Generation Z 212 movement on the workers’ movement and left-wing forces?

The main characteristic of GenZ 212 is the politicization of a large segment of youth after decades of sectoral struggles, the most significant of which was that of unemployed university graduates. This latter movement structured youth struggles for over twenty years and disappeared after the state replaced direct recruitment with competitive examinations. Instead of fighting together, young people were pitted against each other. The country also experienced struggles by young teachers, the most important of which was that of the Teachers’ Coordination, organising contract workers, which shook the education sector for six years.

Higher education has experienced fragmented struggles, particularly in institutes and higher schools, the most important of which was that of students in faculties of medicine and pharmacy, which lasted 11 months (December 2023-November 2024).

The unifying nature of the Generation Z 212 movement and its demands, which concern the working class as a whole, make it a significant step in the evolution of youth consciousness. Furthermore, the confrontation with state repression and the shift from social to political demands—including the removal of the head of government and the disappointment sparked by the king’s speech on October 10th, 2025—represent a move towards greater political clarity. This has manifested itself in the political debates organized by the movement on the Discord platform, with the participation of political actors, all from the left and supporters of a parliamentary monarchy that strips the king of his absolute powers.

There is no doubt that the influence of the movement, which has temporarily receded under the weight of repression and promises from the government, will extend to young workers, who are also active in the digital space, to all young people from the working classes, as well as to the base of the trade union movement.

Will young people find their way toward forms of self-organization that structure their movement outside the virtual world? Will they evolve toward a radical, comprehensive political perspective? This will depend on the workers’ movement and its involvement in sectors that employ a large number of young people, as well as on the emergence within it of a left-wing pole that defends the real interests of the working class with a vision that offers an alternative social project. It will also depend on what left-wing forces do. As usual, some of these forces are content to express their solidarity with social struggles from afar, call on leaders to reform, and wait for elections, while their grassroots activists play a significant role in numerous popular struggles and in everyday union resistance. As for the radical left, most of it is called upon to review its tactics, whether in union work, where it refuses to defend an alternative line to that of the bureaucracy, aligning itself with the latter in exchange for positions in the apparatus, or in the course of electoral political life, where it adopts a sterile abstentionist position.

The politicization of Generation Z and the rapid evolution of their consciousness represent a major shift in the Moroccan political landscape, a landscape rich in possibilities that opens up unprecedented opportunities for left-wing forces. For over forty years, young people have been radicalizing in a reactionary fashion, strengthening Islamist forces, which has practically turned the page on the Marxist youth radicalization that characterized the 1960s and 70s. Today, we are facing a wave of politicization in a completely different context, due to the profound erosion of class consciousness following the defeats of the workers’ movement and national liberation movements, but this is not, however, an Islamist politicization.

Since young people took to the streets on September 27, 2025, the conditions for building a broad anti-capitalist left have improved, based on the social demands at the heart of youth struggles—the same demands as those of workers’ resistance and popular resistance in rural areas. Everything depends on how we act, drawing on events as they unfold. Politics is nothing other than the art of acting appropriately in response to circumstances.

Globally, the youth uprisings in many Asian countries and in Madagascar, as well as the global solidarity movement with Palestine, of which the general strike in Italy was a qualitative step, have had positive effects, to which must be added, at the regional level, the general and global strike that took place in the Tunisian province of Gabès on Tuesday, October 21, 2025. There is great hope that internal and external developments will combine to give new impetus to the workers’ and popular struggle in Morocco.

4 November 2025

Published in French in Inprecor, issue 739, December 2025.


Attached documentsgenz-212-movement-in-morocco_a9306.pdf (PDF - 935.7 KiB)
Extraction PDF [->article9306]

Footnotes


[1] 212 is the international telephone country code for Morocco.



Ismail Manouzi
Ismail Manouzi is a Moroccan activist.

Class struggle in France in 2025: Searching for a breakthrough

By John Mullen

Published 26 November, 2025

First published at Spectre.

The slow moving but deep political crisis in France has been heating up since September. President Emmanuel Macron’s fourth Prime Minister in eighteen months is stumbling along and could fall soon. Several huge days of action with mass strikes and “Blockade Everything” mobilizations, and the record unpopularity of Macron, contribute to the ongoing unravelling of Macronism.

The situation opens up important questions for left activists, such as the potential and limits of left reformism, the role of trade union leaders, and the tasks of Marxist activists.

The state of play is characterized by a certain paralysis on both sides of the class struggle. On the one hand, the ruling class has not managed to crush any major section of organized workers, nor to demoralize the workers’ movement, and it can now — in 2025 — no longer stabilize a governmental system to continue imposing austerity. On the other hand, the trade union leadership has put a brake on workers’ revolt. Every time a mass workers’ movement rises up, the leadership’s conservative stance has prevented a major breakthrough on our side and led to the loss of defensive battles that could easily have been won. The rise of the radical left party, the France Insoumise, has brought hope, but there are innumerable obstacles and pitfalls. Encouraged by endless media fabricated panics about migrants and Muslims, the far right is riding high in opinion polls while whole sections of the traditional right are now thinking that alliances with fascism are the way forward. Moreover, steamroller smear campaigns against the radical left are moving up a gear. Mass involvement, discussion, education and agitation must be at the center of our plans.

Political crisis

In 2022, Macron won a new term as president in a second round runoff against fascist candidate Marine Le Pen of the National Rally (RN), with many voting for him only to keep the far right out. Ever since, Macron hoped to continue his mission of decisively accelerating neoliberal austerity. By “making France competitive” he hoped to win his place in history as the Margaret Thatcher of France.

This was taking place in the context of rapid political polarization. We saw a sharp rise in support both for the far-right National Rally (which won 8.1 million votes in the first round, and 13.2 million in the second), and for the insurgent radical left Jean-Luc Mélenchon of the France Insoumise party (“France in Revolt,” which won 7.7 million votes in the first round).1 Meanwhile, the parties which had most often been in government obtained record low scores, including the Socialist Party candidate who polled only 620,000 votes and the traditional right Republicans who got 1.7 million.

In the next election cycle, Macron’s “centrist” grouping of allies won only 245 of 577 seats in the parliament, so had to constantly find votes from the traditional right to be able to pass legislation. In 2024, frustrated with this situation, the president called snap elections. All the polls predicted there would be a far right Prime Minister after these elections — and it has since come to light that Macron himself tried to facilitate a far right victory by asking traditional conservatives to stand down in the event of any threeway, second round contests.2

Fortunately, the most dynamic antifascist election campaign in decades—led by the radical left France Insoumise and accompanied by voter registration drives — managed to push the far right National Rally into third place, in as far as the number of seats in the National Assembly is concerned. The parliament, after these July 2024 elections, was then divided into three groups. The largest was the left alliance (193 MPs), dubbed “the New Popular Front” (although not corresponding to what Marxists usually call a “popular front”).3 This included the France Insoumise, the Communists, the Ecologists and the Socialist Party. Its radical program — presented as 150 or so priority policies — included pledges to raise the minimum wage by 14 percent, end homelessness, dismantle the most violent police units, and end arms sales to Israel.4

The second largest was the center right bloc, Macron’s grouping with his immediate allies with 166 seats. Macron had lost 86 seats in parliament compared with the previous result. This left in third place the far right National Rally, with 123 MPs plus 16 allies who had broken away from the traditional Right.

Since then, President Macron has been running an antidemocratic circus. Instead of appointing a Prime Minister from the left-wing alliance that is the largest single bloc in the assembly, he has appointed a series of center right PMs. The first two, Michel Barnier and François Bayrou, each stumbled along for a few months. They relied on the fact that the far right National Rally (with 123 MPs) and the generally socially liberal Socialist Party (with 68 MPs) would, in the name of “stability,” withhold their support from a vote of no confidence against the government. A no confidence vote in the National Assembly would topple the government which, with Macron running out of options, would undoubtedly trigger new parliamentary elections.

When Bayrou lost a vote of confidence in September 2025, he was replaced by Sébastien Lecornu. In early October, the new PM Lecornu named his reactionary team of ministers, only to resign just fourteen hours later, in the face of already sharp rows within the cabinet’s ranks. Frantic talks among party leaders ensued until, in a clownish move that stunned commentators, Macron reappointed Lecornu to the position of PM on October 10. The latter quickly cobbled together a team of ministers with even fewer political principles than the previous gang.

To avoid an immediate vote of no confidence, Lecornu made some small concessions to the left while maintaining all the essentials of a vicious austerity budget. The proposed budget, presently debated in parliament, would cancel the indexation of retirement pensions to inflation, make huge cuts to the health service, and increase the yearly military budget by over 6 billion euros totaling 54 billion.

The left bloc in parliament is made up of four significant forces. The France Insoumise with 71 MPs, founded ten years ago, forms the centre of gravity for radical left politics inside and outside of parliament. It has plenty of aspects that Marxists object to (elements of left patriotism, for example), but represents class revolt across France at least as well as Zohran Mamdani does in New York. Then there is the Socialist Party, with 66 MPs. Since the 1980s the Socialist Party has been in government for a total of twenty-four years, during which time it has gradually moved to the right. The vicious neoliberal labour reforms it pushed through in 2012–17 destroyed its electoral base: in 2022 the Socialist Party candidate got less than 2 percent of the votes in the first round of the presidential elections. Since then, it has been trying to revive itself, temporarily joining the left electoral alliance as part of this process.

The Communist Party (17 MPs) is a party in decline. Under the leadership of Fabien Roussel, the party is in search of a space to the right of the France Insoumise, who it often sees as an enemy. The Greens with 38 MPs have left moments and less left moments, but are very much in a left moment right now: since the overwhelming victory for leftist Marine Tondelier to the party’s leadership, the Greens have been more prepared to ally with the France Insoumise and have concentrated on linking ecology and social justice.

One of the concessions Lecornu made to the Socialist Party as PM was to propose suspending the process of raising the retirement age and of increasing required years of work necessary to benefit from a full pension. If voted through by the parliament, the process will be suspended until after the presidential elections in 2027. This “suspension” of the pension reform, while wholly inadequate and widely seen as a trick, represents a political humiliation for Macron, who had claimed a definitive victory for this very long battle over his flagship policy; the concession could encourage the present social movement to push hard for a proper reversal of this attack. Watching Macron’s public consolation of right wing politicians whimpering over this threat to their long, noble crusade to reduce our retirement pensions was grimly amusing.

The proposed suspension of the pension reform gave the Socialist Party leadership the excuse they wanted to abstain from the vote of no confidence on October 16, and thus they abandoned the New Popular Front. The no confidence motion subsequently put forward by the France Insoumise (alongside the 17 Communist MPs and the 38 Greens) received 271 of the 289 votes needed to overthrow the government. A subsequent no confidence motion put forward by the fascist National Rally got 144 votes.

However, it is unclear how the suspension will be presented to parliament and there remains every chance it will be bundled up with social budget cuts. For the time being, the new government is stumbling along, with the risk that the Socialist Party might rejoin the revolt, leading to snap legislative elections. This is looking less and less likely as, a month later, in mid November, Socialist Party MPs voted for the first half of Lecornu’s annual budget.

The SP leadership faced protest about their decision to save Macron, even from inside their own party. Seven of their own MPs voted with the France Insoumise in October, and the SP youth organization called for all MPs to vote no confidence in Lecornu. The SP leadership are motivated by both a desire to show the capitalists that they are moderates who love stability and by a fear that snap elections now would lead them to lose support to the radical left and facilitate the coming to office of a far right government.

Lecornu’s proposed concessions to the far right include increasing the tax paid by people who are asking for residence permits from 200 to 300 euros, and introducing a silly new “integration test” — previously only applied to people asking for nationality — for anyone applying for long term residency. Applicants will have to show their knowledge of the history of secularism, the role of the three branches of government, the main stages of European integration, and a load of other things that many locals do not even know. This is just grandstanding to please the far right.

Meanwhile, a BFM opinion poll showed early September that 64 percent of citizens would like President Macron to resign. A further major opinion poll in early October showed that only 14 percent of citizens have a positive view of president Macron.5 The radical left has proposed the impeachment of the president for failing to respect the results of the last democratic election.

International capital is tempted to punish the French state for not squeezing French workers harder. In early September, Fitch international credit ratings downgraded France from AA- to A+. In October, Standard and Poor followed suit. These new ratings are heavily used in propaganda by the right wing as “proof” that defending pensions and public services is simply being unrealistic and living in a fairytale land.

Wider chaos

This crisis in governmental stability as it pursues austerity is part of a wider chaos. As in other developed countries in recent decades, French capitalists have enlarged the share of national wealth going to shareholders and reduced the share going to workers, through both intimidation and legislation in multiple areas. They have facilitated this by using warmongering, racism, and particularly Islamophobia, to dissuade people from uniting to fight back. The left media venue Fakir calculates that over the last eight years in France the total supplementary amount given to the rich and to corporations by the government has been 377 billion euros. This includes their gains from the abolition of the wealth tax, the installation of a ceiling on company taxes, and the reduction of the higher bands of income tax.6 According to the economics journal Challenges, the total wealth of the top five hundred richest people in France has gone from 300 to 1,100 billion over the last fifteen years; meanwhile the number of poor people in France has gone from eight and a half to ten million over the last five years.7

Nevertheless, in France the capitalists have been less successful than in many places. Huge social movements, sometimes winning, sometimes losing, have slowed down the march of neoliberal austerity. The number of strike days in France per thousand workers was 171 in 2023 and 161 in 2019. That number has been below 65 only once over the last ten years.8 These numbers are generally five to ten times higher than comparable figures for the United Kingdom and the United States (although around 2022 there was an upturn in strike days in both states).9

There has been a generalization of political class consciousness in France after the mass political strikes of 1995, 2006, 2010, 2013, 2019 and 2023 (against attacks on pensions or on labor protection legislation) and the popular revolts of 2005, 2018 and 2024 (against police violence or rural poverty). Much to the confusion of bourgeois journalists who could not fathom the idea of solidarity, it was quite common to see people on the streets defending labor rights or pensions who were not themselves personally affected.

Popular slogans and songs in the mass demos illustrate this class solidarity. Ten years ago, we had “Social Security belongs to the workers: we fought to get it and we’ll fight to keep it!”10 More recently, the streets resounded with the following song: “Here we are, here we are! Although Macron doesn’t like it, here we are! For the honour of the workers and to build a better world, although Macron doesn’t like it, here we are!” 11

If we compare France with, say, Britain, in areas as different as pensioner poverty and education policy, we see that French workers have had some success in defending their positions. University education is still close to free in France, compared to ten thousand euros a year in the United Kingdom, while pensioner poverty is a third of that in the United Kingdom.12 Although various attacks on union workplace rights have gone through — for example, the reduction of powers of elected workplace health and safety committees and the reduction of facility time allowed to elected staff representatives — trade unions still have considerable protection and rights in France. Bargaining coverage through the system of “conventions collectives” is double what it is in the United Kingdom, and nine times what it is in the United States.13 Legal protection of union representatives and strikers remains fairly solid.

In the public sector, under twenty percent of workers are members of a union, and in the private sector less than ten percent. However, trade union influence is far wider than these misleading figures suggest. Millions of non-members nevertheless vote for and are represented by union candidates for health committees, company councils, regional wages councils, and other such bodies. These bodies negotiate locally, regionally, or nationally on health, safety, bonuses, promotions, transfers, working hours, wages minimums, and pay scales. Agreements signed by trade unions on these bodies apply to all workers, union and non-union alike. Whether or not the workers involved are themselves union members, many workers see union members as activists, organizers and advisors whose job is to support individual workers and lead various fightbacks. It is very common for non-members to join strikes called by a union.

The French ruling class has chipped away at many rights and services, but has not managed to break the spirit of the workers’ movement by destroying the organization of a key section, as Thatcher managed to do with the miners in 1984, or Reagan with the Air Traffic Controllers in 1981. The very fact that, at the beginning of his presidency in 2017, so many commentators spoke of Macron’s desire to be “the French Margaret Thatcher” shows that we have not yet had one.

Trade union and movement fightback

The fightback in recent years against the drive to give ever more of our wealth to the billionaires and place profit before the planet has been multifaceted and revealed itself through traditional workers’ movements, green direct action campaigns, and innovative citizens’ mobilizations (such as the Yellow Vests and the “Blockade Everything” networks). Although the new citizens’ networks have their importance, the workers’ movement is the key actor.

The question of retirement pensions has been a key point of conflict with the state. Throughout 2019, huge strikes and mobilizations succeeded in blocking the government’s plan to raise the retirement age and move to a new points-based national pension scheme, which would have been infinitely easier to privatize further down the line.14 Instead of the present system — in which pension rights are a proportion of previous wages and the funds are secured by present workers and employers contributing a percentage of salary to fund the retirement of older people — Macron’s proposed reform would have each employee accumulate points, the value of which could be regularly revised by the government. The move from there to a disastrous reform like the one in the United Kingdom — which made retirement pensions an individual, rather than collective problem — was evident, and the prospect made millions furious.

When the COVID pandemic hit, Macron, frightened by the mobilizations and happy to have an excuse to save face, preferred to shelve the proposed reforms. After much hesitation, he reintroduced an attack on pensions in late 2022. The new reform was less ambitious: the points system to set the stage for privatization was abandoned, the “special” more favourable schemes won by some groups of workers with strong unions were no longer to be abolished for staff presently working, and the standard retirement age was to be raised more gradually from 62 to 64 (rather than 65 as initially planned).

The campaign to defend retirement pensions in 2023 saw a dozen huge days of action with mass strikes and an array of creative acts of resistance.15 But this was not sufficient to stop Macron; even though a majority of the population supported the idea that the movement should go further, the trade-union leadership’s reluctance to call a general strike, allowed Macron to push through the two year lengthening of the working life by using an authoritarian clause of the French constitution that allowed him to avoid a vote in parliament.16

As mentioned above, this attack on pensions may be suspended. In the past few weeks, trade unions have mobilized against both the pension reform and the maximum austerity budget proposed. A trade day of action led by the trade unions on September 18, 2025 saw mass strikes, as did a follow up day on October 2. A further day of mass strikes has been called for December 2. Opinion polls showed 56 percent of the population “supported” or “sympathized with” the strikers in October, compared with 25 percent who were opposed. Teachers, hospital workers, energy and bank workers, bus drivers, and local government workers struck. Many factories were closed, and fourteen universities were blockaded. In Paris there were no trains except during rush hour and well over a million demonstrators protested. Students joined the protests en masse. “The State budget will be decided in the streets,” read one banner.

But the union leadership was in no way up to the job. After the success of September 18, rather than building on the dynamic, union leaders said they would give the government five days to respond, before calling a further day of action. But days of action every couple of weeks tend to dissipate combativity: there were fourteen of them in the huge and eventually unsuccessful movement of 2023! In late October the joint declaration of the national union leadership broke all records in uselessness. It concluded:

Our organisations call on workers and their unions to keep up the pressure and their demands through actions in companies, services and administrations, through various initiatives, the setting up of information meetings, general staff assemblies, etc. The organizations have already agreed to meet again very soon.17

The leaderships’ statement did not fix a date for future strike action. Workers were simply told to do what they could locally, whereas a national acceleration of the revolt was required.

In any case, the present showdown with the government had been predicted for many months, but no preparations at all were made by the national leaders for serious strike action. While the level of anger was sufficient to build toward a general strike, no such building happened. Some federations such as the CGT (General Confederation of Labour) and Solidaires are more combative than others, such as the CFDT (French Democratic Confederation of Labour). Tragically, the most combative federation leaderships concentrate their efforts on persuading the least combative to join the days of action, rather than building for a grassroots explosion. A national coordinating committee, the intersyndicale, meets after each day of action to mull over the future of the movement. Because of the compromises reached behind closed doors in the intersyndicale, the whole strike movement moves, in practice, at the speed of the least combative organization — however inspiring the radio interviews by CGT leader Sophie Binet might be.

There are some signs of challenges to this leadership strategy within the trade union movement. For example, Unité CGT, a publication from the left wing of the CGT union federation was calling the intersyndicale “the headquarters of defeat” in mid October: “we need to reject the strategy of one day strikes whose only aim is to kill off the movement,” it wrote. Many other groups of workers attempt to bypass the conservatism of national leadership through town and regional meetings of grassroots networks. These are quite common and can help build combativity. Nevertheless, there is the danger of the influence of a sort of anarcho-syndicalist conception that “we don’t need the national leaders.” The fact is that the national leaderships retain overwhelming legitimacy, both in the media and in public opinion, and grassroots organizing must be combined with vigorous campaigning on the theme “we pay these leaders’ salaries: we demand they organize a fight!” Lobbying rallies outside the intersyndicale meetings would be an excellent move.

Macron is also concerned about other forms of citizens’ mobilization. In recent years there have been a series of direct action campaigns on green issues, including a successful campaign against a new airport which was planned at Notre-Dame-des-Landes in the West of France and continuing mass campaigns against industrial-scale water retention projects (which penalize small farmers).

But it was the impressive Yellow Vest mobilizations that took place between 2018 and 2020 that really humiliated Macron and inspired so many people.18 The very recent “Blockade Everything” initiatives have led people to hope for a repeat of the mass enthusiasm of the Yellow Vests.

While the Blockade Everything mobilizations — which emerged around a social media call with unclear origins — remind us of the Yellow Vest movement, there are a number of important differences. The Yellow Vest movement was concentrated in small towns where political party and trade union structures tend to be much weaker. The far right initially tried to win influence within the Yellow Vest movement, but slow and effective work by trade unionists and left activists eventually made this impossible, and the movement moved leftwards. The government’s deployment of violent repression on a level unseen for decades and the movement’s vocal opposition to police violence encouraged this leftward shift.

The new Blockade Everything mobilization is not as strong in smaller towns, and the mobilization is not as massive as the Yellow Vests yet. An inspiring mass of actions aimed at bringing down Macron were called by the Blockade networks on September 10. Dozens of motorways were blockaded, including ring roads around Paris, Bordeaux and Lyon. High schools, factories, hypermarkets and universities were barricaded, while 280 decentralized rallies were held across the country.19 The Paris rallies were particularly noted for the crowds of dynamic high school students. It is interesting to note that from the beginning, Marine Le Pen and the far right have distanced themselves from the blockade option.

The left-wing bloc

All political parties are in crisis here. A strong left reformism in the shape of the France Insoumise, made possible by the rise of political class consciousness and the weakness of revolutionary organizations, is playing a very positive role. Nevertheless, considerably more Marxist input into debate would be useful.

The main change in France on the left in recent years has been the rise of the France Insoumise, whose most popular speaker, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, stood at the presidential elections in 2017 (getting 7 million votes) and 2022 (where he gained 7.8 million votes).20 The team around Mélenchon has succeeded in building a mass organization, with thousands of local Action Groups resting on the idea of “a citizens’ revolution” defending a radical left program. The program takes climate emergency seriously, insisting on the need for a radical transformation of society (100 percent renewable energy and 100 percent organic farming are among their proposals). The program aims at “a stable job for every citizen,” a “revolution in the tax system” raising money from those who have it, and “cancelling the public debt.” It proposes the imposition of maximum salary in each company, a sharp increase in the minimum wage; the indexing of all wages to inflation, price freezes on basic food products, and guaranteed basic amounts of water and electricity free for every household, free nurseries, and the lowering of the voting age to 16. The full, crowdsourced program includes 831 measures, far too many to list here.21

The France Insoumise leadership has not caved in on those issues that usually pull reformist groups back into line: police violence, Palestine, and Islamophobia (this last point is a historic weakness of the French left). When the working class suburbs of France exploded in response to yet another racist police murder caught on video — of Nahel Merzouk in 2023 — the FI insisted on speaking of a “revolt” and not of “riots.”22 Jean-Luc Mélenchon declared “The [media] guard dogs [of the establishment] are ordering us to call for calm. We call for justice!… Suspend the police murderer.”

Mélenchon is the first national politician to put the fight against Islamophobia front and center in his speeches. Among young people and poorer sections of the population, support for the FI is strong and may be rising.23

With a very few notable exceptions, the revolutionary left has not reacted appropriately to the new mass reformism, despite the fact that the France Insoumise allows people to join its action groups while being members of other left organizations.24 Many groups see the FI as unwelcome competition, so they stand in elections against the FI and almost never organize debates with its representatives. The worst join in the smear campaigns against Mélenchon.

The center of the France Insoumise strategy is to win elections and oppose the dictatorship of profit from within the government. Marxists are very familiar with the massive force capitalists can mobilize to stop such a government from achieving its aims, as well as the impressive means to stop the radical left from ever getting into government in the first place. To me, getting fully involved with this movement “for a citizens’ revolution” while maintaining our indispensable role of pushing for political clarification seems to be the way forward.

Bardella, Le Pen and the other fascists

In this crisis, the far right National Rally and its fascist cadre are not so much “waiting in the wings,” as is sometimes said, but rather comfortably seated in armchairs stage right, sipping cocktails while waiting for a chance to move centre stage. The organization has been trying hard to gain respectability and to appear as a normal party of government. On October 23, the RN published its own “alternative budget.”25 They do not propose to tax the rich and would cut social budgets by tens of billions of euros. Their proposals include deporting unemployed people without French nationality, ceasing France’s agreed contribution to the European Union, and making huge cuts on investment grants to regional governments. They promise not to impose the wealth taxes presently under discussion. Their “alternative budget” is, in fine Trumpist style, stuffed with lies and incorrect calculations. It is aimed at reassuring racists and capitalists that their priorities are central. Little surprise then that, with the help of the Macronists, two RN members were elected among the six vice chairs of the National Assembly (the lower house of the parliament) in early October.

Opinion polls these days show that 30 percent of people declare they would vote for the far right candidate Bardella if the presidential election took place today.26 Although the election campaign of 2024 showed the rapid progress the left can make in a very short time and in defiance of pollsters’ predictions, a far right presidency under Bardella is obviously an important danger. Another poll in late October showed that 47 percent of French people thought the National Rally was capable of governing the country.27

The mass media assists the continuing rise of far-right influence through its daily foregrounding of “the problems” of immigration, Islam, government spending, and the Palestine movement. In a vain hope to undercut the far right, the government regularly launches campaigns against Muslims, which of course reinforces the fascists. In 2021, the minister for Higher Education denounced the (apparently huge) influence that “Islamo-leftists” enjoyed in the universities. In 2023, the government launched an official campaign against the wearing of North African tunics by high school students, claiming it was a way for Muslim fundamentalists to infiltrate education (Muslim headscarves are already banned in high schools).28 The France Insoumise are right to repeat their slogan “Macron and Le Pen — more of a duet than a duel!”

An alignment between moderates and radicals on France’s right seems much more likely than on its left. While the soft left Socialist Party is ever more reluctant to ally with the radical left France Insoumise and often joins in the smear campaigns against it, the leadership of the traditional Right is divided. However, according to Jean-François Copé, a leading voice in the Republicans, “an overwhelming majority of activists [in the Republicans party] want an alliance with the National Rally.” As the political crisis continues, a governmental alliance between the fascists and the right after the next elections is a real risk.

Antifascist mobilization was huge during the election campaigns of June and July 2024. The result was a tactical victory for the antifascists: Bardella’s bid to be Prime Minister failed despite predictions of the polls. The National Rally is very strong in parliament, but very shaky on the streets and in its local party structures. There have not been mass, far right demonstrations for decades—no doubt because the RN leadership, working hard at detoxifying its image, does not want street fights that would make its hardcore nazi supporters visible.29

A major weak point of the French left is that antifascist mobilization outside of election campaigns is fairly rare and is generally local in focus. There are excellent local examples of antifascist activity, such as last May’s rally in Paris and a rally early September in Bordeaux against Bardella’s mass meeting.30 However, left organizations have not made stopping the National Rally from building local structures and cultural presence a national priority. Large numbers of left activists tend to believe either that Macron’s government is fascist (making a particular focus on the RN unnecessary) or that presenting a left alternative in government is the only way to undercut fascist influence (making mass direct action to stop fascist organizing unimportant).

This neglect of antifascist action has not always been the norm. Back in the late 1990s, the campaign Manifeste Contre le Front National’s policy of mass “democratic harassment” had considerable success.31 Mass demonstrations were called in front of far right meetings, and particular attention was paid to protesting against those politicians of the traditional conservative parties who thought the time had come to ally with the neofascists for electoral purposes. The campaign inspired a generation of young activists and severely frightened “respectable” right wing patrician politicians. One of the results was a split in the Front National (as it was called at the time), which caused severe damage in fascist ranks. We need to bring back mass democratic harassment of the National Rally.

Conclusion

Clearly we are only at the beginning of a deepening crisis. Marxists will need to be dynamic and flexible, working with wide layers of people while constantly looking for spaces to debate fraternally about revolution and reform, fascism and antifascism, trade unionism and class action. The new, mass, insurgent left reformism in the form of the France Insoumise is a very positive development. It would be tragic if Marxists continued to see it primarily as unwelcome competition, rather than as a chance to fight arm in arm and work things out together.

Given that the France Insoumise allows dual membership, I do not see any reason why revolutionaries should not join FI action groups (and some of us do) but even those who feel they have reasons not to do this should put ten or twenty times more effort than currently on working with the organization and debating with the FI on a dozen questions which have been ignored.

John Mullen is a revolutionary socialist who has been active in the Paris region for forty years, and is a supporter of the France Insoumise. His website is at randombolshevik.org.

• 1

  For reasons more linguistic than political, the best translation of La France Insoumise is France in revolt rather than the France Unbowed used by many journalists. Mélenchon’s latest book has now been published in English. Jean-Luc Mélenchon, Now, the People! Revolution in the Twenty-First Century (New York: Verso, 2025).

• 2

  “C’est confirmé: Macron voulait gouverner avec le RN en lançant une dissolution,” Contre Attaque, September 26, 2025, contre-attaque.net/2025/09/26/cest-confirme-macron-voulait-gouverner-avec-le-rn-en-lancant-une-dissolution/.

• 3

  In Marxist circles, the term “popular front” is generally reserved for alliances not exclusively made up of left parties and including liberal bourgeois parties. This was not the case in 2024.

• 4

  The full 2024 manifesto was reproduced in L’Humanité and is available online. Nouveau Front Populaire, “Nouveau Front Populaire! Le Programme Complet,” L’Humanité, June 15, 2025, humanite.fr/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/LHumanite-presente-le-programme-du-Nouveau-Front-Populaire.pdf. For details of the situation immediately after those elections, see Mullen “The post-election challenge in France,” and Jaffard, “The French elections and the defeat of the far right.” John Mullen, “The post-election challenge in France,” Monthly Review, October 21, 2024, mronline.org/2024/10/21/the-post-election-challenge-in-france/;  Sylvestre Jaffard, “The French elections and the defeat of the far right: An Interview with Sylvestre Jaffard,” Tempest, August 10, 2024,tempestmag.org/2024/08/the-french-elections-and-the-defeat-of-the-far-right/.

• 5

  “L’observatoire politique,” Elabe, October 8, 2025 elabe.fr/barometre-politique-oct-2025/.

• 6

  Cyril Pocréaux, “Ils se cachent? Qu’ils se cassent,” Fakir, September 16, 2025, fakirpresse.info/ils-se-cachent-quils-se-cassent/.

• 7

  Nicholas Framont, “Comment Vont les 500 Familles les Plus Riches de France?” Frustration, August 19, 2025, frustrationmagazine.fr/riches-challenges/.

• 8

  “Les journées individuelle non-travaillée (JINT) – depuis 2025 (annuelles),” Republique France: Dares, accessed November 13, 2025, data.dares.travail-emploi.gouv.fr/explore/dataset/dares_jint_depuis2005/table/?sort=-date.

• 9

  “Labour disputes; working days lost due to strike action; UK,” Office for National Statistics, accessed November 13, 2025, ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/employmentandemployeetypes/timeseries/bbfw/lms; “Annual work stoppages involving a thousand or more workers, 1947 – Present,” U.S Bureau of Labor Statistics, accessed November 13, 2025, bls.gov/web/wkstp/annual-listing.htm.

• 10

  La sécu aux travailleurs ! On s’est battu pour la gagner, on se battra pour la garder!

• 11

  On est là! On est là! Même si Macron le veut pas, nous, on est là! Pour l’honneur des travailleurs et pour  un monde meilleur, même si Macron le veut pas, nous, on est là! “On Est Là! (La Chanson Officielle), YouTube video, 3:04, posted by “Monsieur Selby,” April 23, 2023, youtube.com/watch?v=qz26-wkbD1U.

• 12

  Servet Yanatma, “Pensioner Poverty in Europe: Which Countries Have the Highest Rates?” Euronews, June 16, 2025, updated June 18, 2025, euronews.com/business/2025/06/16/pensioner-poverty-in-europe-which-countries-have-the-highest-rates.

• 13

  This OECD report describes in some detail union bargaining in France. OECD, France: Main Indicators and Characteristics of Collective Bargaining (Paris: Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development, 2025), available at oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/data/datasets/oecd-aias-ictwss/France.pdf.

• 14

  John Mullen, “Where now for the French strike movement,”  The Left Berlin, January 24, 2025, theleftberlin.com/where-now-for-the-french-strike-movement/.

• 15

  John Mullen, “Revolt in France: Macron humiliated, but no victory for workers yet,” Counterfire, April 23, 2023, counterfire.org/article/revolt-in-france-macron-humiliated-but-no-victory-for-workers-yet/

• 16

  IFOP Opinion, “Les Français, la réforme des retraites et la journée du 7 mars – Ifop-L’Humanité,” IFOP, March 6, 2023, ifop.com/article/les-francais-la-reforme-des-retraites-et-la-journee-du-7-mars-ifop-lhumanite/.

• 17

  “Communiqué intersyndical: Retraites – un premier pas qui en appelera des autres,”  CGT Services Publiques, October 24, 2025, cgtservicespublics.fr/actualite/article/communique-intersyndical-retraites-un-premier-pas-qui-en-appellera-d-autres.

• 18

  John Mullen, “Macron, Yellow Vests, and class struggle,” Counterfire, January 14, 2019, counterfire.org/article/france-2019-macron-yellow-vests-and-class-struggle/.

• 19

  For a useful account, see Curran Vigier, “France: ‘Block Everything.’” Catherine Curran Vigier, “France: ‘Block Everything’ a new, radical movement of revolt is emerging,” Rebel News, September 8, 2025, rebelnews.ie/2025/09/08/france-block-everything-a-new-radical-movement-of-revolt-is-emerging/.

• 20

  Grégory Bekhtari, “The Meaning of France Insoumise,” Jacobin, April 23, 2017, jacobin.com/2017/04/the-meaning-of-france-insoumise.

• 21

  Full details of the program are available online. “Le Programme,” La France Insoumise, accessed November 13, 2025, https://programme.lafranceinsoumise.fr/programme2025/livre

• 22

  John Mullen, “Rioting across France after police murder teenager,”Spring, July 3, 2023, springmag.ca/rioting-across-france-after-police-murder-teenager.

• 23

  For more details on LFI’s social action organizing, you can browse their website. “Homepage,” Action Populaire, accessed November 13, 2025, actionpopulaire.fr/.

• 24

  A couple of smaller groups work within the FI.

• 25

  Clément Guillou and Corentin Lesueur, “Le RN propose un contre-budget hypothétique et radical,” Le Monde, October 23, 2025, lemonde.fr/politique/article/2025/10/23/le-contre-budget-hypothetique-et-radical-du-rassemblement-national_6649070_823448.html.

• 26

  Cluster 17, Sondage: Intentions de vote – Election présidentielle (Montpellier: Cluster 17, 2025), available at commission-des-sondages.fr/notices/files/notices/2025/octobre/9990-pres-cluster-17-le-point-3-octobre.pdf.

• 27

  Ronan Tésorière, “47% des Français pensent que la RN est capable de gouverner le pays, selon un Sondage Ipsos,” Le Parisien, October, 2025, leparisien.fr/politique/47-des-francais-pensent-que-le-rn-est-capable-de-gouverner-le-pays-selon-un-sondage-ipsos-21-10-2025-EI4CCL2265BE7EGGFEHERTMNEQ.php; Gilles Finchelstein, “More French voters leaning to the far right, poll shows,” Le Monde, October 22, 2025, https://www.lemonde.fr/en/politics/article/2025/10/22/more-french-voters-leaning-to-the-far-right-poll-shows_6746677_5.html.

• 28

  John Mullen, “French government attacks Muslims again: How will Left opposition hold up?” Spring, September 7, 2023, springmag.ca/french-government-attacks-muslims-again-how-will-left-opposition-hold-up.

• 29

  For a recent assessment of the RN, see my interview in The Left Berlin. Marijam Sariaslani and John Mullen, “French Fascism and Marine Le Pen,” The Left Berlin, February 11, 2025,  theleftberlin.com/french-fascism-and-marine-le-pen/.

• 30

  Le Monde and Agence France-Presse, “A Paris, la justice valide l’interdiction d’une manifestation antifasciste, mais autorise celle d’un group néofasciste,” Le Monde, May 9, 2025, lemonde.fr/societe/article/2025/05/09/a-paris-la-justice-valide-l-interdiction-d-une-manifestation-antifasciste-mais-autorise-celle-d-un-groupe-neofasciste_6604457_3224.html. Juliette Cardinale, “Rentrée du RN à Bordeaux: une manifestation prévue en centre-ville contre l’extrême droite et ses idées,” Actu Bordeaux, September 13, 2025, actu.fr/nouvelle-aquitaine/bordeaux_33063/rentree-du-rn-a-bordeaux-une-manifestation-prevue-en-centre-ville-contre-l-extreme-droite-et-ses-idees_63158185.html/.

• 31

  Interestingly, it was led by a left faction of the Socialist Party.