French students demonstrate solidarity in the fight for better schools

It began as a protest over crumbling classrooms and missing teachers, but France's student movement is now challenging the political establishment to give young people more of a say in decisions about their future.


Issued on: 10/11/2026 - RFI

Cover image: Students at the Hélène Boucher high school in Paris blockaded the entrance for more than three weeks before riot police were sent it to end the blockade. AP Photo/Nicolas Garriga - Nicolas Garriga
02:11

By:  Alison Hird


“There’s a massive hole in our classroom," says Marianne Gerbet, 19, who is in her second year of a literary classe préparatoire – intensive programmes to prepare students for the entrance exams for France's most prestigious universities – at Hélène Boucher high school in Paris.

With winter approaching, she fears it will become increasingly difficult to study. "How are you supposed to sit a mock exam when water is falling on your paper?” she asks.

The situation in poorer working-class neighbourhoods is far worse, she says, with “ceilings collapsing, rain coming through the roofs... rats running round your feet”.

As at hundreds of high schools across France in recent weeks, Marianne and her fellow students have been blockading entrances in protest at run-down schools and a shortage of teachers, and over the Parcoursup online university admissions platform, which they say is unfair and overly selective.

"It's a movement of solidarity," Marianne said, standing by a banner reading “Gen Z, Generation Revolution”, as riot police – sent in on Tuesday to break the blockade – allowed a handful of students to enter the school.

“It’s not normal to have police in front of a school,” says Maya, 16, who claims she was tear gassed and chased by police at 7am that morning, after trying to build barricades out of green rubbish bins.


'Collective exhaustion'

Despite the police presence, and missing out on lessons, protesting students say they won't back down.

“It’s a sacrifice,” Gerbet says. “We’re being told to go back to class, but how on earth are we supposed to study properly when we’re not in the right conditions?”

Pupils will have to catch up, she admits, but returning to school without proper facilities is not the solution.

There is “a contradiction” at the heart of the protests, acknowledges Alice de Brito, a 22-year-old representative of the National Union of Students of France (Unef).

“They’re losing weeks of education because they want to have the right to study, it’s really crazy,” she notes, while underlining that without the blockades it wouldn’t have become obvious that teacher shortages were so bad.

For 17-year-old Aissata Ba, the whole education system needs overhauling.

“These blockades are the result of collective exhaustion,” she says. “We don’t have time to do anything. We’re at school from 8am to 6pm, we see our teachers more than our parents.”

Spotlight on France, episode 152 © RFI
Listen to a report and interviews on the student protests in the 

Spotlight on France podcast

Too young to vote

The younger generation as a whole doesn't have much to look forward to, says Rebecca Lyon-Caen, 16, who describes herself as a good student from a well-off family.

“There’s a shortage of housing, jobs, the threat of AI and the international situation is worrying,” she says. “We don’t have the right to strike, and we can’t vote. We really feel that our voice is constantly being suppressed. It’s frustrating, because we have things to say.”

This frustration is shared by de Brito, who has been taking part in discussions with government ministers in her role as a union representative.

“We’re really tired of not being taken seriously because of our age,” she says. “We want the government to take young people seriously and to start seeing us for what we are: young adults, not children any more.”

'They think we're idiots'

Initially, the government response largely focused on the rioting and looting that broke out on the margins of the demonstrations of 17 October that were otherwise largely peaceful.

But on 26 October, following another weekend of protests involving teachers and unions, the government announced a series of concessions.

These measures include up to €4 billion in low-interest loans to renovate schools, some 3,000 fully qualified replacement teachers to fill staffing gaps, 15,000 additional places in higher education and a proposed limit of 28 pupils per class. The education ministry also pledged to phase out Parcoursup by 2028.

“None of the decisions we make are empty promises,” Education Minister Edouard Geffray said. “Everything we say will be done and respected within specific time frames and with figures.”

But with presidential elections coming up in April and May next year, Ba is not convinced the government will make good on its pledges.

“Who can tell us that they will be maintained and put in place?” she asks, questioning whether the announcements are intended to bring lasting change or simply “calm the revolt”.

“We haven’t been heard,” she says, arguing that the 15,000 extra university places promised by the government fall far short of the 250,000 they are asking for.

“We’re not satisfied with these crumbs,” said 16-year-old Marguerite, adding that a few weeks of missed lessons was a “relatively small price" to pay in their fight for better school conditions.

As for Parcoursup, which student unions have contested since its inception in 2018, de Brito says the government’s proposed changes amount to smoke and mirrors.

“They’ve agreed to stop it but they’re going to put in another website that does the same thing, with another name,” she says. “They think we’re idiots.”

Years of underinvestment

A spike in births in 2010 has led to a rise in the number of 16-year-olds now attending schools that have been underfunded for years, and where teacher numbers have not kept up with the number of students.

The anger currently being expressed by students and teachers alike reflects years of neglect in the education system, says sociologist Fabien Truong.

“It’s the underinvestment of the past 15 or 20 years that we are paying for today,” he told RFI. The consequences have become so serious, he argues, that the system is struggling simply to function.

These protests should not be seen as those of a generation preoccupied only with its future, he noted.

“It’s a feeling of anxiety about the present, even more than the future,” he said. “Pupils are fighting for schools that work now – with functioning buildings, teachers in classrooms and enough places in higher education.”

The government insists it has heard the students’ concerns, but the dire state of France’s public finances means it cannot come up with the €10bn the student unions are demanding.

However de Brito says the government "finds adjustments when it wants to".

She cites the example of a July 2025 Senate commission enquiry which claimed up to €211bn had been handed to big French companies in reduced tax and social contributions.

She also points to a voluntary military service plan announced by President Emmanuel Macron this year for the sum of €2.3bn – although the financing is spread out over the next four years.

Sense of solidarity

While the stand-off between the government and students is ongoing, de Brito says there are positives. The concessions obtained so far show that “if they continue [protesting and blockading], they can obtain more”. And they've been part of the dialogue, which she says “hadn’t happened for a long time”.

The biggest source of satisfaction for her is the way high-school and university students of all backgrounds have come together.

Pupils at Henri-IV, one of the capital’s most prestigious secondary schools, told de Brito they were protesting because they did not understand why students in poorer areas should be left behind

“When you talk to high school students in the suburbs they talk about overseas territories, when you talk to overseas territories they’re talking about rurality... everyone is looking after each other,” she says.

At the University of Créteil, where de Brito studies, students have organised tutoring for high school pupils who have missed lessons because of blockades.

She has seen students from prestigious schools in Paris bringing their notes, giving them to other high schoolers so they can keep up.

“That solidarity is the best thing I’ve seen come out of these protests,” she says, hoping it continues long after the protests end. “It’s great that we’ve built this collectively."

Listen to more on the student protests in the Spotlight on France podcast, episode 152.

 

Smart glasses and sensors bring AI to vocational skill assessment

A five-layer end-edge-cloud system records every operation at the workbench and pairs automated scoring with expert judgment, offering a route to large-scale, fairer assessment of practical skills

ECNU Review of Education

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Vocational skill instruction is conducted at the workbench, where effective assessment is correspondingly difficult. An instructor responsible for thirty students cannot observe every movement of every hand, and a formal hands-on examination that documents each step is costly to administer at scale. Some assessment frameworks have responded by reducing the time allocated to authentic practical tasks, a compromise that weakens the competence such frameworks are intended to certify.

A study published in the

  ECNU Review of Education (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/20965311261489286) argues that artificial intelligence can relax this constraint. Guoqing Xu and Jinfang Cai of the Institute of Vocational and Adult Education at East China Normal University, together with Qi Xuan of the university's School of Teacher Education and Hangzhou Electronics and Information Vocational School, present the architecture of an intelligent vocational skill assessment system and examine its operation in one major.

The authors identify three persistent difficulties. The first concerns scale. Skill instruction is organized as whole-class teaching, whereas hands-on assessment is time-intensive per candidate and therefore resistant to mass implementation. The second concerns process. Traditional craft production was evaluated through its final product, so that a master could diagnose a learner from the completed work alone. Modern industry, however, operates with speed, precision, and tightly sequenced procedures, in which the correctness of each step is consequential, yet continuous observation of every student's every action lies beyond the capacity of any instructor. The third concerns fairness. Assessment continues to rest largely on examiners' observation, so that standards are difficult to unify and reliability remains low.

The proposed system treats the workbench as a site of data capture. Students wear smart glasses equipped with miniature cameras that record the operation from the first-person perspective of the operator, capturing soldering angles, tweezer manipulation, instrument readings, and component layouts that a fixed camera would not register. The bench is instrumented in parallel with current and voltage probes, microphones that detect equipment sounds and debugging prompts, and force-sensing gloves. An edge gateway cleans, de-noises and time-aligns the data streams before transmission, and in the cloud these streams are fused with operation logs to construct a digital representation of the student's skill execution.

Assessment proceeds in tiers. Skills governed by programmable rules, such as instrument operating sequences and standard soldering gestures, are scored through computer vision action recognition, which applies pose estimation and temporal action segmentation to verify the order and standardization of each step. Skills with objectively quantifiable outcomes, such as circuit output waveforms, are assessed by comparing real-time signals with benchmark libraries through dynamic time warping. Only skills that require genuine diagnosis, such as fault-repair strategy or the originality of a design, are referred to a large multimodal model, which returns evidence and hypotheses rather than verdicts.

This division of labor is intentional. The system operates on a principle of automated scoring followed by expert adjudication: the model scores what it can, flags items whose confidence falls below a threshold, and refers them, together with a time-stamped evidence chain of video and sensor segments, to an examiner. Experts review the flagged segments, score dimensions such as originality and problem-solving strategy, and their corrections re-enter the training set as reference data.

The authors emphasize that the objective is not to replace examiners but to reposition their work, so that expert attention is directed toward the judgments that genuinely require expertise.

Applying the framework to the electronic technology application major, the study maps foundational, specialized, comprehensive, and career-development skills onto three modes of assessment: fully automated, human-machine collaborative and human-centered. Routine circuit calculation can be graded entirely by machine; hand-soldering quality is screened by computer vision and confirmed by an expert; fault diagnosis in a complete electronic unit remains a matter of human judgment.

The anticipated benefits are practical: assessment that can operate at the scale at which vocational education is delivered, millisecond-level quantitative analysis of process that exceeds the resolution of the human eye, and diagnostic reports that inform students which operations they have mastered and which require further work. Two conditions are specified. The system depends on two curated training assets, namely a standard-operation video repository and a sensor-signal benchmark database, and on anonymized data processed at the edge in accordance with regulations such as the GDPR. Its results must also be validated against human scores before they can carry certification weight.

For vocational education, the implication is that its most persistent weakness may at last become addressable through instrumentation rather than through additional demands on teachers' attention.

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Journal

ECNU Review of Education

DOI

10.1177/20965311261437798

Method of Research

Computational simulation/modeling

Subject of Research

People

Article Title

Intelligent Vocational Skill Assessment System: Development and Application Prospects

 

New teaching model offers a way forward for Zimbabwe’s multigrade classrooms

ECNU Review of Education

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A new study in Zimbabwe highlights the challenges teachers face in rural multigrade classrooms, while limited necessary training, teaching materials, and instructional support, making it difficult to teach students from different grade levels simultaneously. Drawing on qualitative evidence from teachers, school leaders, and teacher educators, the researchers developed a six-step progressive teaching model to strengthen classroom management, teacher preparation, and learning outcomes in multigrade settings.

Teacher education in many developing countries has long been criticized for emphasizing theory while offering insufficient preparation for the realities of classroom practice. As a result, providing quality education to remote rural communities remains a persistent challenge. Published on May 19 2026 in ECNU Review of Education (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/20965311261437798), the study examines this challenge in Zimbabwe's fast-track resettlement satellite schools, where multigrade teaching has become a common response to low enrolment and limited resources.

The research focuses on satellite schools established following Zimbabwe's Fast-Track Land Reform Programme (FTLRP), which began in 2000. These schools were created to provide education for children living in newly resettled farming communities. Located largely in remote and sparsely populated areas, many lack sufficient enrolment to maintain separate classes for each grade. Teachers therefore often work with students from two or more grade levels in the same classroom.

The study adopted a qualitative case study design informed by interpretivist and grounded theory approaches. Data were collected through in-depth interviews, focus group discussions, observations, and document reviews. Participants included experienced multigrade teachers, school administrators, and heads of teacher education departments. The researchers used thematic and interpretive analysis to identify recurring patterns and challenges in multigrade settings.

The findings reveal the considerable pedagogical and management challenges created by  the diversity of multigrade classrooms. Many teachers reported having to manage what effectively amounted to two separate classes within a single classroom. They often prepared separate lesson plans, schemes of work, and classroom records for each grade, substantially increasing their workload. Classroom observations further showed that students from different grades were frequently taught separately within the same classroom, often facing different chalkboards and receiving different instruction.

Limited preparation for multigrade teaching emerged as a major concern. Teachers reported that their training focused primarily on monograde classrooms, leaving them with little or no preparation for teaching multigrade classes when they entered satellite schools. Interviews with teacher educators similarly indicated that teacher education curricula do not adequately address the pedagogical and management approaches required in multigrade settings. An analysis of teacher education syllabi reinforced these findings, revealing little content specifically designed to prepare teachers for multigrade classrooms.

Curriculum materials add to these difficulties. Existing textbooks, teachers' guides, and other instructional resources are largely designed for monograde classes. Teachers explained that the lack of materials adapted to multigrade settings often forces them to teach different grades separately rather than build a cohesive learning community. The researchers argue that this mismatch between curriculum design and classroom realities places additional pressure on teachers and makes classroom management more difficult.

The study also draws attention to the gendered dimensions of multigrade teaching. Female teachers described having to balance the demands of managing multigrade classrooms with substantial domestic responsibilities. According to the stud, these pressures may affect career development and contribute to unequal professional experiences between female and male teachers.

To address these challenges, the researchers developed a Sequential Pedagogy Model for Multigrade Classes. The model emphasizes establishing learners' zones of proximal development, presenting content through a developmental sequence that connects grades, assigning practice work to one group while advancing another, and regularly assessing learners' understanding. Its aim is to shift multigrade teaching away from managing multiple several separate classes toward a more integrated pedagogical approach.

The authors conclude that effective multigrade teaching depends on specialized pedagogical training, appropriate curriculum materials, and sustained professional support. They recommend revising teacher education curricula, expanding pre-service and in-service training, developing handbooks on multigrade and gender-responsive pedagogy, and conducting further research into barriers to gender-transformative education in resettlement schools.

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Journal

ECNU Review of Education

DOI

10.1177/20965311261437798

Method of Research

Case study

Subject of Research

People

Article Title

Toward a Progressive Model for Teaching Multigrade Classes in Zimbabwe's Fast-Track Resettlement Satellite Schools: Aligning Theory With Practice in Education

Sporadic clashes between police and protesters as renewed demonstrations sweep France

Tens of thousands of people turned out once again on Saturday to denounce France's rising cost of living, with largely peaceful demonstrations taking place in major cities across the country. Police used tear gas to drive groups of protesters from Paris's Place de la Nation after some individuals allegedly threw projectiles at the assembled riot police.


Modified: 08/11/2026 
By: FRANCE 24

This is the fourth consecutive weekend of protests. © Sébastien Bozon, AFP


Tens of thousands of people protested across France Saturday in a new show of anger against the government with clashes erupting between police and some protesters in Paris following a peaceful march through the capital.

The protests marked the fourth consecutive weekend of demonstrations against the rising cost of living which have erupted as the country heads to presidential elections in five months' time where the far right sees its best chance yet to win power.

Read moreFrench student unions say 250,000 people took part in Saturday’s protests

A total of 146,000 people took part in demonstrations across France on Saturday, including 46,000 in Paris, the interior ministry said. Unions put the figure at 250,000 protesters nationwide, with 75,000 in the capital.

Some 70,000 members of the security forces were deployed Saturday. © Sameer al-Doumy, AFP

These figures were lower than the previous three weekends of protests but also came after a mass union protest on Thursday that rallied 575,000 people according to the authorities – or 1.6 million, according to unions.

At the end of the protest in Paris, police used tear gas against individuals throwing projectiles and homemade fireworks at the security forces, an AFP correspondent said.

Police alleged that a group of 200 violent individuals attacked officers as they were arresting a man who had set fire to a trash bin in the square at the Place de la Nation.
Banned protests thwarted

Some 70,000 members of the security forces were deployed Saturday, ready to move in quickly after riots and looting broke out on the fringes of nationwide peaceful demonstrations on October 17.

Unions had staged a march along a traditional route, from the Place de la République in central Paris to Place de la Nation in the east of the city where the clashes erupted at the end of the protest.

This wave of demonstrations started in late September when high school students protested conditions at their establishments. © Sébastien Bozon, AFP

But the Yellow Vests movement – a group whose protests shook Emmanuel Macron in the early years of his presidency almost a decade ago – called for a rival demonstration at the Place de la Concorde in central Paris, a stone's throw from the president's Élysée Palace and the lower house of parliament.

This action has been banned by the authorities, and on Saturday a large police presence prevented protesters from getting close. Some 100 people who arrived were surrounded by police and one of the movement's coordinators, Benjamin Ball, and its spokeswoman, Azelma Sigaux, were among those arrested by police, an AFP reporter said.

In the southeastern city of Lyon, police fired tear gas to disperse several hundred people in the city centre blocking a road during an unauthorised gathering.
'Keep the pressure on'

The wave of demonstrations was sparked by a movement in late September by high school students angered by deteriorating classroom conditions. These teens, joined by university students, remain at the heart of the protests.

"Today is a date that helps keep the pressure on," said Sabine Kharbach, spokeswoman of the Student Union. "Many young people are mobilising because the government's responses remain unsatisfactory."

The police response has faced criticism for being heavy-handed, with dozens of internal investigations launched into allegations of brutality against demonstrators.

Police's rubber-coated projectile balls or grenades have caused at least 20 people – including teenagers – to be seriously injured during protests since mid-September, according to an AFP count.

Earlier cases included a 14-year-old who in September lost most of his teeth when a police officer fired a grenade at him at point-blank range.

A 15-year-old in October lost his hand at a protest when a ball grenade exploded. A police union source said he picked it up, but a witness said the grenade landed on him.

At least two people have permanently lost the use of an eye after being shot by police sting-ball grenades.

The police response has faced criticism for being heavy-handed. Geoffroy van der Hasselt, AFP

Shop windows of stores in Paris and other cities were again barricaded with wooden shutters and often closed for the day to prevent potential ransacking.

The government is grappling with ways to find solutions but maintains it is constrained by France's heavy debt.

Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu is to meet unions and employer federation representatives on Monday to discuss wages and purchasing power.

But student and teacher groups in France have called for a new strike on Tuesday to keep pressure on the government for more education spending, saying they were "in a position of strength (and) the government in a position of weakness and starting to yield".

(FRANCE 24 with AFP)

‘We Could Have Waited’: Caesareans The Norm For Pregnant Women In Greece – Analysis

Graphic: Igor Vujcic/BIRN.

November 10, 2026

Balkan Insight

By Eleni Stamatoukou

Key Takeaways:

Nearly 63% of births in Greece in 2025 were by caesarean section, one of the highest rates in the EU, driven by time pressures, staff shortages, limited midwife-led care and insufficient training in vaginal birth.

Many women reported feeling pressured into unnecessary C-sections, with poor informed consent and lasting trauma, while experts note rates above 10% do not reduce mortality and raise risks.

Proposed remedies include midwife-led care, natural-birth centres, Robson classification audits and hospital incentives, but implementation remains stalled amid resistance and no national oversight.

Five weeks before her due date, Mirela’s doctor told her the baby was in the breech position, lying bottom or feet down.

The doctor proposed a caesarean section, but Mirela, a 32-year-old electrical engineer from the island of Crete, was reluctant and asked why. Responding to a BIRN online questionnaire, Mirela recalled her doctor growing annoyed and telling her to “do what you want, at your own risk”.


Mirela asked about a non-invasive procedure in which the foetal position is manipulated, but, she said, the doctor insulted her and dismissed the procedure as dangerous. Eventually, the baby turned on its own, head down. Nevertheless, the doctor insisted on inducing labour, claiming that “the baby was big”.

Mirela tried unsuccessfully to find another doctor and eventually agreed to an induction. Thirteen hours passed without a contraction, during which time Mirela couldn’t eat and her water intake was rationed. Weak and worried, she underwent a C-section. This was January 2025.

Mirela said she suffered “nightmares for months” afterwards and had to seek psychological help.

According to the Hellenic Statistical Authority, ELSTAT, almost two-thirds [62.7 per cent] of births in Greece in 2025 were by C-section, up from 58.4 per cent in 2020.

In 2023, EU data placed Greece fifth in the bloc in terms of rates of C-sections, behind Turkey, Cyprus, Romania and Bulgaria.

Experts blame the rate on a desire among doctors as well as parents “to save time”, as well as shortages of midwives and anaesthesiologists, a lack of doctor training in natural childbirth, and not enough information for young couples.

Experts blame the rate on a desire among doctors as well as parents “to save time”, as well as shortages of midwives and anaesthesiologists, a lack of doctor training in natural childbirth, and not enough information for young couples.

C-sections “are not treated as a surgical procedure,” but rather as an “expected outcome of pregnancy,” said Kleanthi Gourounti, a professor in the Department of Midwifery at the University of West Attica and Vice President of the Midwives’ Association of Athens.

Obstetrician Ioannis Mouzalas, a vocal advocate of natural childbirth, told BIRN: “It is a solution for the obstetrician that used to save money, but now it saves time, unless you consider that time is money.” At his clinic, the C-section rate is between 18 and 22 per cent.

“I’ve come to believe that natural childbirth will remain the minority, not only because of doctors but also because of the mindset of just wanting to ‘get the birth over with’,” Mouzalas said. “Nevertheless, I think it’s worth trying to increase natural childbirth. Not for ideological reasons, but for scientific reasons.”
‘We could have waited’

Maria, a 37-year-old lawyer, gave birth to her first child in August at a public hospital in Athens via a C-section. The procedure was deemed medically necessary “due to the baby’s breech presentation and the umbilical cord being wrapped twice around its neck and shoulder”, she said.

Maria had preferred a vaginal birth, and her doctor, whom she had chosen because she trusted him, encouraged her to wait and try certain exercises to help the baby change position, but to no avail.


“I felt a bit disappointed,” Maria said, but “I accepted the decision, prioritising my child’s safety”.

Gourounti said it “goes without saying that a C-section can be lifesaving for both the woman and the foetus”.

“The issue, however, is that there must be documentation justifying the necessity of every C-section.”

The Hellenic Obstetrical and Gynaecological Society has set guidelines for performing C-sections.

But what happens in cases where a C-section is not necessary?

Another respondent to the questionnaire, Eftichia, quoted her doctor as saying: “When women reach their 39th week, I induce labour. I don’t let them go any longer.”

Eftichia, a 34-year-old police officer, had attended seminars led by independent midwives in Athens during her first trimester. While she preferred a vaginal birth, the seminars had prepared her for every eventuality.

During one of her check-ups, her doctor mentioned that there was low amniotic fluid and suggested that her waters might have broken without her realising; the very next day, he “announced that he was going to break my waters”.

The induction began at 9:00 a.m., but by 6:00 p.m., there was still no cervical dilation. She was told that the baby’s position was preventing pressure on the cervix, which is necessary for dilation to begin, so a C-section was performed.

“That is why I believe that if we had waited just one more week, I might have been able to give birth naturally, even with an induction,” Eftichia said. “The baby would have descended and moved into the proper position, something that didn’t happen because, for some reason, we were in such a rush.”

The cause of Greece’s high rate of C-sections is “multifactorial”, said Dimitra Kentrifylli, an independent midwife and lecturer in the obstetrics department at the Metropolitan College in Thessaloniki.

They begin with “the wrong prenatal care monitoring plan”.

“Normally, there should be midwife-led care for low-risk pregnancies,” said Kentrifylli, in “close collaboration with obstetricians”.

Research shows that midwife-led births are less likely to involve medical intervention as midwives are more likely to treat childbirth as a natural process and focus on psychological support and the position of the mother.

“When a woman in labour has a midwife continuously by her side, the likelihood of needing a Caesarean section decreases, and overall birth outcomes improve,” said Apostolos Athanasiadis, president of the Hellenic Society of Obstetrics and Gynaecology.

“This is because the care provided is truly personalised – essentially one-on-one – allowing a strong relationship of trust to develop between the midwife and the woman,” he added.


Other factors include a shortage of anaesthesiologists and midwives, a lack of public awareness, and a failure to conduct regular evaluations of the service provided by healthcare bodies.

According to the World Health Organisation, WHO, C-section rates above 10 per cent do not reduce mortality but instead increase health risks for both mother and baby.

Kentrifylli said that fear of childbirth drives many women to request C-sections, yet this fear remains “unrecognised”.

Of 14 women who told BIRN it was their wish to have a C-section, nine said they were afraid of a natural birth.

Likewise, Mouzalas said, some young obstetricians also turn to C-sections “out of fear or panic” because they don’t have enough experience of natural births.

According to Gourounti, when you have a high rate of C-sections, new resident doctors and midwives do not get to practice vaginal deliveries, and thus “the skill is lost”.
Are women given enough information?

Niki* was eight months gone when her doctor told her the baby was “too big”, that she had a “very narrow pelvis”, and that the baby would “tear her apart”.

Despite her partner’s objections, Niki agreed to a C-section.

“A doctor is someone to whom you entrust your body,” she said. “It is extremely difficult to shatter that trust; it’s like choosing to turn a blind eye – as if you don’t want to hear the truth.”

She describes the birth of her child as “an unforgettable, negative experience”.

“I didn’t see that, through this, I had gained a child. All I saw was that I had ended up with an incision on my abdomen.”

Almost half of respondents said they felt steered or pressured into undergoing a C-section.

Gourounti said the question is “to what extent the choice, the consent to all of this, is truly informed”.

More than two thirds of respondents said they did not receive any prenatal information about birth options from their midwife or doctor.

Angeliki, a 38-year-old teacher, said she underwent a C-section she now believes was not medically necessary.

In her response to the BIRN questionnaire, she cited “the importance of women being well-informed promptly, choosing appropriate healthcare professionals, and receiving support during childbirth and breastfeeding”.

Gourounti said women must also actively seek information: “We are currently living in an era where information is available online. We can access it. Furthermore, we should certainly press the professional we are consulting to discuss this with us. In other words, women themselves need to assert their rights”.


Ioanna Vasilaki, an independent midwife and president of the Association of Independent Midwives of Greece, EAMME, said doctors will sometimes suggest inducing labour so the baby can be delivered during his or her shift. Often this ends in a C-section.

A third of respondents said their labour was induced; a quarter of these women said they were not told why.

Half who underwent C-sections said it was conducted as an emergency procedure.

Gourounti said it was “quite strange that when you go to give birth, one in two women ends up having some kind of difficulty or medical issue that arises during labour, necessitating an emergency C-section”.

According to Giorgos Daskalakis, professor of obstetrics and gynaecology at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens and director of the first obstetrics and gynaecology clinic at the public Alexandra Hospital, some doctors in public hospitals outside Greece’s main urban centres work too many shifts, “so it is extremely difficult for them to spend too much time performing normal deliveries on women”.

Midwives say that often epidurals are not provided to women giving birth vaginally because there aren’t enough anaesthesiologists in Greece.

According to a report in the Greek newspaper Kathimerini in 2024, there are roughly 1,000 anaesthesiologists in Greece. The Hellenic Society of Anaesthesiology puts the figure at 750, in a country of some 10.5 million people. That’s far fewer than global healthcare bodies recommend.

“If you pay,” said Kentrifylli, “if you find a hospital doctor and they see you privately in their office and take you to the emergency room without it being time for you to give birth and put you in a labour induction position, then you will have the option of an epidural.”

Daskalakis said that issues with the legal framework in the event of alleged malpractice are also driving doctors to err on the side of caution by recommending C-sections.

“Consequently, every time a complication arises, the simple question asked is: ‘If a C-section had been performed, would things have turned out differently? Would it have been better?’ And the inevitable answer is that a caesarean section would obviously have led to a better obstetric outcome. Terrified of legal repercussions, doctors are highly susceptible to performing a C-section just to get through the process easily.”

In mid-2024, a law was passed allowing for the creation of Natural Birth Centres within public hospitals and independent institutions, where midwives would oversee deliveries. Amid what midwives say is resistance from obstetricians, no such centre has been opened in the public health system. One private centre was opened, but it closed in January this year, citing financial constraints.

Daskalakis is not enthusiastic about such birth centres. Instead, to encourage natural childbirth, he says staffing should be approved, uniform protocols introduced, and public awareness raised.

Financial incentives?

Daskalakis also argues for bonuses for hospitals that cut their own rate of C-sections.

“The money won’t go into someone’s pocket,” he said. “It will go to the hospital, which will automatically have an incentive to monitor the process because it will receive a bonus.”

Mouzalas, however, said the way a birth is handled should have nothing to do with “economic or ideological” considerations. “It should be related exclusively to scientific reasons”.

In 2017, the WHO proposed the use of the Robson classification as the global standard for assessing and comparing C-section rates across healthcare facilities.

The Robson classification was applied for the first time in 2019 by scientists in Greece to identify trends in caesarean births by examining 8,572 women in a private health facility. Just under 61 per cent of births were caesareans, 34.6 per cent were induced, and 30.7 per cent were births after a previous C-section.

However, in Greece, there is a complete absence of any oversight mechanism for C-sections.

“There is no system in place to require every hospital and every physician to provide a substantiated explanation as to why they deemed a C-section necessary,” said Gourounti, who expressed doubts regarding the widespread application of the Robson classification system in Greece.

“Each hospital and each doctor must provide a substantiated explanation as to why they deemed the choice of a caesarean section necessary,” she said.


Professor Athanasiadis told BIRN that the Robson classification is used in all Obstetrics and Gynaecology departments of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, as well as at the Aretaieion and Alexandra public hospitals in Athens, though he stressed he cannot speak for all Ob-Gyn departments across Greece.

According to him, the Robson classification serves as an “internal audit” tool that helps refine clinical practice and reduce unnecessary C-sections. He also underlined that the Robson system can be implemented in public hospitals, but not in private ones, which do not have a departmental structure but instead rely on collaborating private physicians.
The role of the midwife

Gianna, a 33-year-old literature teacher in Athens, faced a number of complications during her pregnancy and, fearing something might go wrong, agreed to be induced.

When the induction didn’t work, a C-section was performed.

“For me, it was a traumatic experience that left me feeling like a failure and filled with guilt,” said Gianna*.

She was left with numbness in her abdomen, and difficulties with breastfeeding took an even greater toll on her emotional well-being.

Almost 40 per cent of respondents described their experience of childbirth as negative, saying it had left them traumatised.

“It is deeply concerning to see such high rates of C-sections, alongside a large proportion of women who return home after giving birth feeling that the entire experience was traumatic, all this in a country facing a severe demographic crisis,” said Gourounti.

For Mouzalas, the increasing number of C-sections is also due to the “distortion of the midwifery profession” in Greece, which is too often marginalised.

In Greece, prenatal care and pregnancy monitoring are usually carried out by obstetricians.

“About one per cent of pregnant women will turn to a midwife as their first healthcare professional,” said Kentrifylli, who, as an independent midwife, supports low-risk, at-home deliveries as well as in private hospitals.

Midwives’ associations have long demanded official job recognition that ensures their professional autonomy and reflects their full scope of competencies.


In February, the health ministry withdrew a draft job description, which midwives criticised as degrading “the scientific and autonomous role of the midwife”.

“The Ministry committed that the responsibility for childbirth would remain with the midwife within the primary healthcare setting,” said Gourounti. “They stated that they would review the text with legal experts and then sign it. Unfortunately, as we speak, this has not yet happened.”

Mouzalas told BIRN: “We need a model where doctors and midwives do not compete, but compete for a common goal.”

The Greek Ministry of Health has not responded to BIRN’s questions.

*Some names have been changed to allow interviewees to remain anonymous.



About Balkan Insight
The Balkan Insight (formerly the Balkin Investigative Reporting Network, BIRN) is a close group of editors and trainers that enables journalists in the region to produce in-depth analytical and investigative journalism on complex political, economic and social themes. BIRN emerged from the Balkan programme of the Institute for War & Peace Reporting, IWPR, in 2005. The original IWPR Balkans team was mandated to localise that programme and make it sustainable, in light of changing realities in the region and the maturity of the IWPR intervention. Since then, its work in publishing, media training and public debate activities has become synonymous with quality, reliability and impartiality. A fully-independent and local network, it is now developing as an efficient and self-sustainable regional institution to enhance the capacity for journalism that pushes for public debate on European-oriented political and economic reform.
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Bangladesh: Insecure Minorities – Analysis

Hindu Dhakeshwari Temple in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Photo Credit: Kuruman, Wikipedia Commons

November 10, 2026

SATP

By Shivangi Sharma

Key Takeaways:

A series of October–November 2026 killings, temple vandalisms, looting and shrine attacks targeted Hindus, Sufis and Bauls across multiple Bangladeshi districts.

Human Rights Support Society data show attacks on religious minorities rising sharply in 2026, with 50 incidents in the first half of the year versus 10 in the same period of 2025.

The insecurity stems from overlapping political instability after the 2024 uprising, religious intolerance, disputed classifications of “communal” violence, and weak law-enforcement accountability.

On November 4, 2026, a 50-year-old man, Zahed Bepari, was hacked to death inside a Sufi Shrine in the Charkewar Union of the Munshiganj Sadar Upazila (Sub-District) in Munshiganj District.

On October 27, 2026, a Hindu barber, Rabindra Monirishi (43), was stabbed to death in the Noman Gate area of Jamirdia in the Bhaluka Upazila of Mymensingh District.


On October 26, 2026, three homes belonging to Hindu families were vandalised and looted in the Pirganj Upazila of Rangpur District over a Facebook post that purportedly hurt the religious sentiments of Muslims. The owners of the affected houses are Bishu Chandra Mohanta, 50; his elder brother Jagadish Chandra Mohanta, 60; and their younger brother Dinesh Chandra Mohanta, 46, all residents of Chak Karimpur Village. According to the Police, Bishu’s son, Saurav Chandra Mohanta, 22, who works at a garment factory in Gazipur, shared a video on Facebook several months ago, which allegedly hurt Muslim religious sentiments.

On October 25, 2026, a Hindu school teacher named Monoranjan Roy (55) was beaten to death while trying to resolve a dispute at a friend’s house in the Parbatipur Upazila of Dinajpur District.

On October 21, 2026, a domestic Baul song festival – scheduled for October 22, 2026 – was not allowed to be held, in Hatia Village of the Kulonj Union in the Dirai Upazila of Sunamganj District. Radicals raised objections that ‘obscenity’ could occur in the name of songs.


On October 19, 2026, Police recovered and defused an improvised explosive device (IED) from the premises of the Fakir Lalon Shah Shrine in the Kumarkhali Upazila of Kushtia District.

On October 11, 2026, a theft took place at the Hindu Radhamadhav Akhra Central Temple in the Akhaura Upazila of Brahmanbaria District. Unidentified miscreants broke into the temple, cutting the grill, and stole six idols as well as gold and silver ornaments.

On October 8, 2026, the Hindu Khayerchara Matri Temple in Ward No. 9 of the Kumarkhali Municipality in Kushtia District was vandalised. Artisans found the heads of the Ganesh and Lakshmi idols and some parts of Durga’s vehicle – the lion – broken. Police stated that the incident was being investigated in light of a dispute over the temple committee and a land dispute.

On October 6, 2026, Police recovered the burnt body of a Hindu businessman, Suprabhat Modak, from a turmeric field in Ward No. 6 of the Ahmedpur Union under the Aminpur Police Station in the Bera Upazila of Pabna District, a day after he went missing.


Human Rights Support Society (HRSS) data indicates that attacks and incidents affecting religious minorities increased in 2026, suggesting a deterioration in security. HRSS’ annual reports recorded 12 temples and 16 houses partially or fully destroyed, with 48 minority individuals injured in 28 incidents in 2022. In 2023, HRSS documented 27 attacks on minorities, 43 persons injured, damage to 17 temples and 31 idols, and attacks on 25 houses. Its 2024 report recorded 112 incidents targeting minority communities, with two people killed and 83 injured, alongside damage to 28 temples, 31 idols, 284 homes and 240 shops and business establishments. In 2025, HRSS reported 28 incidents involving religious and ethnic minorities, one death and 16 persons injured, while more than 56 shrines were reportedly attacked, vandalised or looted. The trend worsened in the first half of 2026: HRSS documented 50 attacks on religious minorities, compared with 10 during the corresponding period in 2025; persons injured increased from four to 56. The recent HRSS report covering July to September 2026, documented at least six attacks on minority communities, leaving six people injured, while two temples, five idols and four homes were vandalised.


Attacks on minorities surged during the political transition of 2024, blurring the distinction between communal violence and political retaliation. Following former Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s departure, attacks on minority homes, businesses and places of worship generated widespread concern, particularly because Hindus had often been perceived as politically aligned with the Awami League. On August 8, 2024, Meenakshi Ganguly, Deputy Asia Director, Human Rights Watch (HRW), stated,


Rioters burned down historical structures and targeted members of Hasina’s Awami League party. In several districts around the country, members of the Hindu community, which is generally considered to have largely backed the Awami League, were violently attacked, their homes torched, temples vandalised, and shops looted. There were also reports of attacks against the Ahmadiyya Muslim community and ethnic minorities.

The United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), in its annual report, 2026, noted


Bangladesh was the site of several concerning blasphemy cases in 2025. In February, authorities arrested poet Sohel Hasan Galib for “hurting religious sentiment.” Police arrested a Hindu man the following month for allegedly insulting the Prophet, leading to his conviction and sentencing to an indeterminate length of time in prison. Authorities arrested a university student in October on charges of desecrating a Qur’an; a mob surrounded his home after videos circulated on social media accusing him of the act. In November, police arrested a Baul singer on allegations of blasphemy and hurting religious sentiment during a musical performance. In December, a mob in Dhaka, Bangladesh, lynched a Hindu man, tied his body to a tree, and set it on fire following rumours he made blasphemous comments insulting the Prophet Muhammed.

On January 19, 2026, a Facebook post by the Chief Adviser’s Office stated that investigations identified 645 incidents involving minorities in 2025, but classified only 71 as communal, labelling the remaining 574 as non-communal. However, on January 28, 2026, the Bangladesh Hindu Buddhist Christian Unity Council (BHBCUC) challenged this classification, reporting 522 incidents of communal violence in 2025. This divergence between the figures published by the BHBCUC and those released by the Interim Government reflects a deeper lack of trust between minority rights organisations and state authorities over the assessment of communal violence. BHBCUC Acting General Secretary Monindra Kumar Nath observed, “The official definition of communal violence appears to exclude killings, rapes, arson attacks on homes, land grabbing and targeted assaults unless they occur inside temple premises.” Nath, however, added, “We still place our hope in the Election Commission and the government… but past experience has repeatedly disappointed us.”


In one of the major incidents this year, on August 22, 2026, a Hindu family of four, including retired Rangpur Zilla School teacher Ganapati Chakraborty, 65; his wife, Pritilata Chakraborty, 50; their daughter, Agami Chakraborty Prarthi, 23; and their son, Priyam Chakraborty, 12, were found murdered in their home in the Daspara area of Rangpur District. Police initially indicated that robbery might have been involved, but on August 26, 2026, Bangladesh National Hindu Mahajot Secretary General Govinda Chandra Pramanik alleged that the high-ranking figures in the administration were trying to cover up the killings in Rangpur by blaming the Hindu community for the incident.

On October 10, 2026, Police detained four persons identified as ANM Ayas (29), President of the Rashtra Sanglap Forum; Mohammad Sakibul Hasan (19); Mohammad Sujon Mia (18); and Marzia Khandaker Rimi (27), while they were attempting to smear black ink on a graffiti portrait of Rabindranath Tagore on a pavement wall in front of the Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy at Segunbagicha in Dhaka. Rimi asserted, “We have come to protest against Indian aggression.” This incident may not directly constitute an attack on religious minorities. However, according to the case documents, the case was filed under sections 120B, 153A and 295A of the Penal Code, relating to criminal conspiracy, promoting enmity between classes and inciting religious hatred. Further, the Police forwarding report submitted to the court noted,


On October 9, Ayas announced that he would erase the mural on the boundary wall by whitewashing it… The next day, Ayas and the other accused went to the spot. Accused Rimi smeared black ink over the mural depicting Nobel laureate poet Rabindranath. She also attempted to incite religious hatred in connection with the upcoming Durga Puja, thereby creating discord and undermining communal harmony.

On October 15, 2026, the Bangladesh Puja Udjapan Parishad reported 34 incidents of idol vandalism, attacks on temples and related violence ahead of Durga Puja, adding that arrests had been made in 11 of the cases. Santosh Sharma, General Secretary of the Parishad, noted, “Security cannot be a concern for only the five days of Puja. We must ensure security for all 365 days of the year.”

The insecurity faced by religious minorities in Bangladesh cannot be attributed to a single cause, but rather to overlapping dynamics of political instability, religious intolerance, competing narratives of national identity, local disputes and weaknesses in law enforcement, specifically after the July 2024 uprising. The fall of Sheikh Hasina’s government in August 2024 created a period of political uncertainty and a vacuum in which attacks on minority communities became a prominent concern. The uprising complicated the situation of minority communities, as they were linked to Awami League politics, leading to questions of national loyalty. The ambiguity highlighted in the data on attacks on minority communities adds to the insecurity of the minority community. Current trends underscore both the continuing vulnerability of these communities and the need for effective protection and accountability from the administration and law enforcement agencies.

About the author: 

Shivangi Sharma, Research Assistant, Institute for Conflict Management

Source: This article was published by SATP

About SATP
SATP, or the South Asia Terrorism Portal (SATP) publishes the South Asia Intelligence Review, and is a product of The Institute for Conflict Management, a non-Profit Society set up in 1997 in New Delhi, and which is committed to the continuous evaluation and resolution of problems of internal security in South Asia. The Institute was set up on the initiative of, and is presently headed by, its President, Mr. K.P.S. Gill, IPS (Retd).
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The Impact Of Martial Law On Philippine Education, 1972-1986: Foregrounding Teachers’ Perspectives – Book Review

"The Impact of Martial Law on Philippine Education, 1972-1986: Foregrounding Teachers’ Perspectives" by Dr. Michael D. Pante


November 8, 2026

By Eurasia Review

Key Takeaways:

Dr. Michael D. Pante’s book, launched 26 October 2026, is the first national-scale historical account of Philippine education under Martial Law (1972–1986) that centers teachers’ experiences in both public and private institutions.

It documents how the Marcos regime’s professionalization and curricular reforms coincided with plummeting education budgets, low pay, overwork and the proletarianization of teaching, prompting teachers to organize for economic and political rights.

The work frames education history as labor history and links past contradictions to present challenges under EDCOM II, including heavy workloads and chronic underfunding.

Ferdinand Marcos Sr. once held up the professionalization of teaching as a mark of national development. Yet this recognition rang hollow as the state failed the very people expected to carry forward and benefit from its education agenda. In one of the Martial Law period’s starkest contradictions, a regime that promised to elevate the profession actually presided over its decline.

“We owe it to Marcos Sr. for the professionalization of the teaching profession. But then again, by the end of the Marcos era, teaching had lost its prestige as an occupation. Teachers, beginning with the Martial Law period, were severely underpaid, extremely overworked,” said Dr. Michael D. Pante, associate professor at the Department of History of the Dr. Rosita G. Leong School of Social Sciences, Ateneo de Manila University.

Pante examines this contradiction in his book, The Impact of Martial Law on Philippine Education, 1972-1986: Foregrounding Teachers’ Perspectives , launched last October 26 at an event jointly organized by the National Historical Commission of the Philippines (NHCP) and the Ateneo de Manila University.


Dr. Pante’s book is the first published historical account of Philippine education during the Marcos years to examine both public and private institutions, from basic to higher education, on a national scale. Drawing on teachers’ experiences, Pante places the labor behind education at the center of a history often told through government policies and institutional changes.

Written with a grant from the NHCP, the book underscores the history of education as a history of labor: of who bears the cost of education policy, whose working conditions are undervalued in reform efforts, and the mass resistance of teachers that followed.

He examines how the Marcos dictatorship’s education reforms—from sweeping curricular changes to the professionalization of teaching—reshaped classrooms, knowledge production, and teachers’ roles in society. Despite these, education’s share of the national budget plummeted, salaries remained inadequate, and working conditions deteriorated. As their profession became increasingly proletarianized, teachers organized alongside blue-collar workers to fight for their economic and political rights.

“Ang mga guro ang unang nakapansin sa mga nangyayari sa ating lipunan noong panahon ng Martial Law… Ang aklat na ito’y hindi lamang tungkol sa nakaraan. Ito rin ay tungkol sa ating kasalukuyan. Hinahamon tayo nitong isipin kung para saan nga ba talaga ang edukasyon. Ito ba ay isang karapatan para sa lahat ng Pilipino o isang kalakal na maaaring bilhin lamang ng may kakayahan?” (“Teachers were the first to notice the social upheavals of Martial Law… This book is not only about the past. It is also about our present. It challenges us to think about what education is really for. Is it a right shared by all Filipinos or a commodity that can only be bought by those who can afford it?”), shared former ACT Partylist Representative Teacher France Castro in a review of the book.


“Mike Pante has given us not only an essential history, but a moving tribute to the great awakeners and keepers of our collective conscience,” said academic Dr. Caroline S. Hau of Kyoto University.

Its release comes as the country continues to reckon with the state of its education system under the presidency of Ferdinand R. Marcos Jr. via the Second Congressional Commission on Education (EDCOM II): in its final report, released in January 2026, the body highlighted persistent problems in Philippine education, including heavy teacher workloads and chronic underfunding.

More than four decades after the dictatorship ended, Pante’s book calls for a reckoning with the promises made in the name of educational progress. Any effort to reform Philippine education must confront not only what the state promises, but what it owes the people who make education possible.

The Impact of Martial Law on Philippine Education, 1972–1986: Foregrounding Teachers’ Perspectives is available through the Official NHCP Bookstore Portal or at the NHCP Central Office Bookstore located on T.M. Kalaw Street, Ermita, Manila.

France

A government on the ropes

Saturday 7 November 2026, by Léon Crémieux

In the midst of a period of popular mobilization in France, on the eve of the 24 October demonstrations, a racist criminal, animated by the Islamophobic slogans of the Rassemblement national (RN) and the rest of the right and far right, wanted to commit a mass crime in Trappes, a working-class town in Yvelines, in the Paris suburbs. This murderer carried out several shootings with a submachine gun and managed to kill one man, Pengo Bossio Wangi, a 26-year-old black Frenchman, and to wound seven others, several of them seriously, in particular a 12-year-old girl, wearing a scarf on her head. [1]

The murderer said he had deliberately targeted people who seemed to him to be “North Africans or black Africans”. Living in another commune in Yvelines, Plaisir, he deliberately chose the city of Trappes. According to an investigation conducted among his entourage, fed on social networks and racist videos, leaning first towards hatred of Jews, with videos of Soral and Dieudonné, dreaming of assassinations like those committed in 2015 against Jewish customers of the Hyper Cacher, a store on the outskirts of Paris. He then turned to a hatred of Arabs, proclaiming his sympathy for the RN. He had printed militant material himself with posters bearing the RN logo.

For more than 30 years, the Front national (FN) and then the RN have systematically targeted working-class municipalities, where families from the Maghreb or sub-Saharan Africa live: Roubaix, Saint-Denis, Trappes, Vénissieux, Vaulx en Velin, the northern districts of Marseille and so on. So many “lawless zones” for many media and politicians. In 1996 Jean-Marie Le Pen proclaimed: “We have given you back Algeria, give us back Roubaix!” 26 years later, Marine Le Pen said: “If we let this happen, tomorrow, there will be a hundred cities like Roubaix, then 10,000 cities. So there is, objectively, an emergency.” Trappes has become, in the Paris region, the main target of this nauseating racist campaign. In 2021, Marine Le Pen wrote on Twitter: “In 30 years, Trappes has become a lost territory of the Republic, under the weight of massive immigration. Mass immigration has been the driving force behind the rise of Islamism in our country”. RN president Jordan Bardella outbid her on several occasions, notably in 2022, after the election of Ali Rabeh, candidate of Génération-s, as mayor: “Trappes is a small Islamic Republic in miniature”.

This tragedy has therefore occurred in a context where these speeches of the current leaders of the RN can spread in the media, without provoking the reactions that the declarations of Jean Marie Le Pen still provoked in the 1990s. The reason for this is simple. The political class, in its vast majority, now wishes to integrate the far right, the RN, as a respectable political force with which government agreements can be built and which can even, as in Italy, assume the leadership of a government.

This obviously implies a definitive break with what remains of the practices, put in place for decades and more or less assumed on the right, of isolating the RN, of refusing any alliance with it. This dam against the RN (which Macron had twice benefited from to be elected in the presidential elections of 2017 and 2022) had worked again for the legislative elections of 2024, allowing, thanks to numerous withdrawals, the avoidance of a majority of RN deputies in the National Assembly. But the New Popular Front and la France Insoumise (LFI) emerged victorious from this phase, and the right as well as the Macronists found themselves destabilized, with the presence of a relative anti-austerity majority in the National Assembly. Since then, the last two years have seen, along with the legitimization of the RN, a haunting mantra displayed in the media and in Macron’s camp, associating LFI and Mélenchon with anti-Semites, violent and enemies of democracy. France Insoumise has been ostracize, insulted and demonized to spread this mantra and create among the maximum number of people a Pavlovian reflex creating, from the very mention of LFI or Mélenchon, a feeling of disgust and rejection.

This has had its small effect in the Socialist Party, since, barely two years after the victorious alliance of the NFP in 2024 (and while no important political event has happened since then) a large number of officials have come to say that it would be out of the question to withdraw for Mélenchon or an LFI candidate against the RN in the next elections. This obsession, this anti-LFI logorrhea, once essentially the work of CNews - the propaganda channel of the billionaire Bolloré - has spread widely to the rest of the media. Thus, a symmetry has been established between certificates of respectability constantly attributed to the RN, the party of order, (carefully erasing all racist insults and provocations, the roots still very much in the ground linking this party to fascism and its criminal obsessions) and anathemas of a curse cutting LFI off from the democratic community.

The tragedy of Trappes has strongly shaken this nauseating system through which a cowardly complacency has been spread while racist words and slogans have just killed and almost provoked a mass murder, since the killer used 128 rounds of ammunition in his shooting. This created a large mobilization in the population, through outpourings of solidarity in Trappes itself, the day after the attack, while in Orléans a demonstration of 26,000 people against the congress of the RN strengthened the desire to create an anti-RN front and a real unity of social and political forces on the left. This was followed by a rally of 12,000 people in Trappes on 30 October.

Despite this, with boundless cynicism, Macron and Lecornu certainly condemned the attack in Trappes, but Lecornu dared to compare the death of Pengo Bossio Wangi to that of the neo-fascist activist Quentin Deranque, who succumbed to his head wounds, received during the confrontation between his group and left-wing activists. As for Macron, he persisted in symmetry, comparing the criminal racism of the far right to the supposed anti-Semitism of the left. To do so is to deliberately erase the mortal danger that the far right represents.

Since then, of course, the media and the government have been trying to put the lid on this tragedy, which should nevertheless require the silencing of Islamophobic words and insults. As Ali Rabeh, the mayor of Trappes, says, racism, Islamophobia, the theory of the great replacement, are not ideas, opinions, they are crimes that should be treated as such in order to put an end to the trivialization of these ideas that lead to discrimination, daily racism, insults and murders. To say that Jews rule the world is, rightly, condemned by the law against anti-Semitism. Is the assertion that Arabs and blacks will replace whites in France less of a crime?

It is in this context that, since 17 October, Macron and his government have been facing a showdown in the streets, with two new major days of demonstrations on 24 and 31 October – which, despite the bans and the anxiety-provoking bludgeon, brought together 800,000 and then 500,000 people – and the approach of 5 November, a major day of mobilization called by the unions for a month and called for by the Gilets jaunes and youth organizations.
In practice, the government creates a climate of violence and repression, describing the country as on the verge of chaos, prey to hordes of ultra-leftists. To do this, in a loop for the past two weeks, the only thing that has been happening in the media are scenes of “urban violence”, testimonies of police officers describing their preparations for order to reign, shopkeepers exposing the looting of their shops... and the need for order to reign.

It was in the name of the freedom of trade and the protection of traders that many demonstrations were banned on 24 and 31 October, that routes away from city centres were imposed, that local curfews were introduced, it was in the name of the risk of riots that the Minister of the Interior issued orders placing people under house arrest and prohibiting the demonstration of environmental or trade union activists by applying measures relating to the law on the fight against terrorism. Similarly, the justice minister, Gérald Darmanin, had pushed for the extension to 72 hours of police custody for young people arrested, including minors, extensions provided for by law only in the context of the fight against organized crime.

Four UN rapporteurs published observations and recommendations on 28 October, saying they were dismayed by the repression of student demonstrations. “The use of force, violence and mass arrests are not appropriate responses to a social protest movement...” [2] All these legal shifts, these exceptional decisions reflect the political impasse of a government with its back to the wall, seeking to stifle the movement, to discredit it, and above all to frighten by increasing repression tenfold. This repression, this anxiety-provoking climate, these numerous mutilations of the eyes or arms, or jaws, suffered by many young people, contrast with the joyful, humorous character of the slogans of the placards and the songs that dot the processions of the youth, despite the tear gas and truncheons. This joyful serenity, but serious in its demands, is the antithesis of a government in desperation that is looking for all the means to get out of the trap which the movement is now setting for it.

He is providing a security and repressive response all the more because his back is against the wall, not wanting to call into question an economic policy totally devoted to the interests of large groups and a social policy aimed at dismantling public services and social systems. In his draft budget, Lecornu also proposes to reduce APLs (personalised housing aid), family allowances, pensions, basically benefits that employees normally receive from the social part of their salary but which, since 1995, have been captured by the state budget. In return, he receives violence in the streets that is a reflection of that exercised by his police and the daily social violence that his policies inflict on millions of men and women of the popular classes.

Macron and Lecornu are using the police (and soon the army perhaps) to protect class politics and “small shopkeepers”, whose protection has been taken as a virtuous pretext, cynically using a social category which, as far as real artisan shops and independent shops are concerned, is just as despised by the Macron government. Far from being treated in the same way as the large capitalist groups with which they sometimes feel solidarity, small craft businesses and retail and local shops (less than 3 employees) see their situation deteriorate year after year, 14162 insolvencies in 2025, +5% compared to 2024. These shops are often hit hard by the decline in purchasing power, online commerce and the development of shopping centres around large distributors and outside city centres. These consequences of ultra-neoliberal policies are much more destructive than the 1160 shops in the city centres of Paris (many of which are large group brands), Marseille and Bordeaux strongly affected by damage and looting.

Nevertheless, after having treated the high school movement from popular neighbourhoods with contempt and violence, the generalization of the movement to all young people attending school in October, the power of 17 October forced the government to open the door to some concessions. These were announced on 26 October. And at the same time, this also leads to schizophrenic behaviour, for example in the attitude towards social networks. On 17 October, the online media Blast revealed a letter from Lecornu sent to the leaders of the four Internet Service Providers (ISPs), Orange, Bouygues, Free and SFR, asking them to be ready to cut off access to TikTok, Snapchat and Instagram, on the day of the 24 October demonstration: “I ask, if I give the instruction, to proceed without delay with the temporary suspension of the services concerned.” Lecornu also asked them to “keep the confidentiality necessary for the preparation of this measure.” [3] In a scathing attitude, a few hours before receiving the youth organizations, Lecornu, the education and higher education ministers received eight influencers so that they could echo the measures announced for the youth, even before receiving the youth organizations, hoping to bypass them. The day before, on a trip to Marseille, Macron did not hesitate to say: "Social networks are damaging our society.”

Lecornu’s announcements obviously testify first of all to the balance of power created by the movement and its legitimacy among the entire population, a balance of power imposing after 7 weeks a “move”, to advance answers to the demands put forward. But, compared to the situation in schools, the consequences for hundreds of thousands of young people, before and after the baccalaureate, these announcements are a smokescreen showing again the extent to which this government takes young people for fools or gullible trade unionists, because as several politicians said, “promises are only binding on those who believe in them”.

The truth is that the high school and student movement demanded an immediate budget extension of 10 billion in 2027 for high schools and the faculty, (the AES- Plus jamais ça, moreover, estimates at 50 billion the budget needed to renovate and adapt the buildings). But in total, behind the loud announcements of 26 October (“the government is committing 5 to 6 billion to the budget” declared Lecornu), the real figure represents, according to the calculations of the main economic daily, Les Echos, a budget line of... 500 million for the 2027 budget, more than 10 times less! [[Les Echos Stéphane Loignon, Budget 2027: ce que vont vraiment coûter les mesures pour les lycéens et les étudiants, 27 October 2027.]]

The government has announced:

 Four billion in the form of loans at reduced rates granted to the regions by the Banque des Territoires. These would therefore be loans committed by the regions, without any additional budget from the state.
 One billion to finance university renovations... by 2029, i.e. 200 million by 2027.
 15,000 additional places in higher education (in the 2027 budget, 190 million), while youth organizations are calling for 150,000 places, i.e. 10 times more so that every young person who has passed their baccalaureate can have a place in higher education.

Moreover, on Parcoursup, far from abolishing the university selection platform, as requested by the youth organizations, the FSU and Sud Education, the government postpones “changes” to 2028 that does not commit it to anything, and does what it knows how to do best, “working groups”. Otherwise, selection would be maintained as it is with only a written explanation of the cause of the refusals!

The only more concrete gain, 1,200 teaching positions in the BTS (Higher Technician Certificate, two years of study after the baccalaureate), 500 positions in secondary school to reach 28 students per class in 50% of the most disadvantaged high schools. The movement would therefore make it possible to slow down the job cuts but, with one additional teacher for seven high schools, we are far from the need to reach 25 students per class in general and technological secondary education, 20 in high schools in priority and vocational education, as requested by the teachers’ unions.

In total, unsurprisingly, the government is not moving. To a request of 10 billion, it responds with 500 million euros! It is out of the question for it to question the 270 billion euros offered to capitalists, mainly large groups. It is out of the question to subject to income tax the 13,000 tax households of millionaires who are exempt, out of the question to tax the 500 largest fortunes in this country who have multiplied their wealth by 14 times over the last 30 years, now amounting to 1,128 billion euros . [4] But tomorrow, it is not 10 billion that the employees, the categories on strike on 5 November, will demand. It will be the upgrading of salaries with the delay since Covid and high inflation, with food and fuel prices, miserable budgets, not only for national education, but also for hospitals and public services. It is this balance of power to impose these demands that is being built for 5 November.

To arrive at a generalized confrontation, a real general strike in the coming days is obviously necessary to settle accounts with Macron’s policies. This is all the more difficult because this government is at the end of its rope, taking refuge behind the shields of the CRS. Nuñez and others like Manuel Valls, like to say that only “the state holds the monopoly of legitimate violence”, partially quoting the seventeenth century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes and the nineteenth century German sociologist Max Weber. For Weber this “legitimacy” came from the fact that the population accepted state authority, or as Hobbes expressed it, this legitimacy came from a social contract with the population that accepted the validity of authority within the framework of this contract. So for them it was not so much violence that was legitimate as the state itself, whose legitimacy was recognized within the framework of the social contract... The problem is that Macron is in no way legitimate, imposing a deeply unpopular government and policies in this country.

31 October 2026

Translated by International Viewpoint.

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Footnotes

[1] Phot: 31 October PAris

[2] https://www.ohchr.org/fr/press-releases/2026/10/france-un-experts-appalled-crackdown-student-protests

[3] Blast-info.fr Actualité 24 October 2026 – https://share.google/CKDRoOIz0wGtABS5y

[4] https://www.challenges.fr/fortunes/fortunes-2025-la-folle-ascension-des-grandes-fortunes-francaises-depuis-1996_615873

• Léon Crémieux

  Leon Crémieux is an activist of the Solidaires trade-union federation and of the New Anti-Capitalist Party (NPA, France). He is a member of the Executive Bureau of the Fourth International.

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