John Last is a freelance journalist and former foreign correspondent living outside Ottawa, Canada.
Across Europe, young people are being arrested in their thousands. In Milan, jackbooted soldiers from the Italian military — average age, 38 — haul protesters, some of whom are as young as 12 and 13, away from picket lines and into armored vehicles. Italy’s government — average age, 60 — has passed a new decree allowing detainments for up to 24 hours without charge. Vandals can now be arrested 48 hours after their crimes; Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini, 53, has called for their parents to face financial penalties too.
Italy’s weekend of protests at the end of October, in at least a dozen major cities, was the most destructive in recent memory. In Milan, hooded youths looted the city’s luxury stores, pilfering products, one reporter wrote, “that they cannot afford and may never be able to buy.” But as shocking as Italy’s protests have been, they pale in comparison to those in France. Mobs of people have paralyzed city centers across the country for weeks. The grand streets of Paris have been blanketed in acrid smoke. French President Emmanuel Macron has accused an alliance of “radical far-left groups [and] criminals” of trying “to bring down the Republic.” Fifty-three police officers were injured over the course of a single weekend.
After more than a month, it is almost hard to believe that protests of this magnitude began over the failures of a university application portal. But by now, the grievances have multiplied: the high cost of fuel, the crowding of schools, the inaccessibility of housing, the growing precarity of work. In turn, the protests have taken on an existential desperation. An unmistakable vibe of despair permeates the masked protesters. “They keep us quiet. They take our money, they tax us a lot and we can’t say anything,” one protester in Paris told the BBC. “It’s been too long, it’s been too much.”
“They” are the elder-elite of Europe, the now-aged baby boomers who greedily gobbled up the assets of their societies: a third of Italy’s housing stock; a quarter of France’s public spending; 98% of the average Spanish worker’s salary, in the form of monthly rent. While young people reel from crisis to crisis — wars, economic stagnation, climate disaster, a pandemic — they cash in. Rising prices, precarious work, broken schools: As a generation, the boomers have remained largely unaffected while the value of their real estate and investments boomed. As their wealth and number grew, they came to set the agendas of unions, politicians and the media, and they bent the state to suppress any who would rally against them. They pioneered a playbook to extract the last cents of value from Europe’s bloated and aging welfare states before departing a world they leave on the threshold of self-destruction.
But the underclass in their wake cannot be restrained forever. In the spasms across Europe, we are witnessing a generational uprising, a war on the reckless landlordism of the last propertied generation. They gouged too deep and for too long; like the dwarves of Moria, they accidentally unleashed a primal foe. “It has been called the children’s war,” La Repubblica reports: an insurgency against calcifying Western gerontocracies waged by their own offspring.
“While young people reel from crisis to crisis — wars, economic stagnation, climate disaster, a pandemic — the now-aged baby boomers cash in.”
In some ways, generational inequality is felt before it can be measured. It is usually assumed that people naturally accumulate wealth over their lifetime, and that a person in their ‘70s should own more in assets than a relatively new worker in their ‘30s. But it wasn’t always so. Today’s old-age security is the result of a general crisis of elder poverty that proliferated across the Western world in the 1920s and ‘30s when people still literally worked themselves to death, or else died penniless. To solve this problem, states embraced a system of “asymmetric socialization,” according to Pieter Vanhuysse, a leading expert in political demography at the University of Southern Denmark. In short, the state took care of the elderly while the family was still mostly expected to take care of the young.
Today, it is hard to imagine a crisis of elder poverty on a similar scale to that of the 1930s, not least because the elderly account for such a large percentage of the population. In France and Italy, thanks to longer lifespans and low rates of reproduction, the number of citizens over 65 has doubled since the arrival of the boomer generation, born between 1946 and 1964, to one in five and one in four residents, respectively. Nor is the phenomenon limited to Europe. In the United States, where fertility rates are higher, the median age has risen by 10 years since 1960. There are fewer than a billion seniors in the world today; by 2060, that number is expected to double and account for a fifth of global population.
As seniors have exploded in number, they have exercised an ever-greater influence on politics. In France, the United Kingdom, Germany, the U.S. and many other developed nations, those aged 65 and over are between 10% and 20% more likely to vote than those aged 18-25. This has contributed to a shocking representative gap — people under 30 account for half of the world’s population but just 2% of its legislators. “There’s a clear representational deficit,” said Daniel Stockemer, a political scientist at the University of Ottawa. “It creates a problem that youth’s concerns are not taken sufficiently into consideration, that youth are not sufficiently included in decision-making processes.”
In a study of intergenerational fairness in state spending, Vanhuysse found a disproportionate favoritism toward the old in nearly all the countries surveyed. Nearly a quarter of young Europeans and nearly half of young Americans are struggling financially; they will also disproportionately bear the weight of the ecological destruction and public debt accumulated by the boomers.
France, where youth first took to the streets, is among the worst offenders. There, public debt now exceeds the value of its economy. In Vanhuysse’s index, it ranks just behind Japan for the disproportionate political power it grants the elderly — nearly two in five civil servants are over 50, a number that has rapidly increased since 2011. Vanhuysse estimates roughly $5 is spent on elderly citizens for every $1 spent on youth. That is clearly evident in the crumbling, overcrowded schools and inadequate universities that first spurred young people onto the streets. State pensions, meanwhile, eat up a quarter of the country’s public spending — including a whole third of the education ministry’s budget.
“Hopelessness is infectious, and we’re in a pandemic.”
All of this would not be so galling if it were not for the fact that the generation now draining state coffers already benefited from an unprecedented golden age of growth. Boomers entered the workforce at the peak of unionization and enjoyed stable employment, wages that beat inflation and guaranteed pensions upon retirement. They were buying starter homes when housing could be had for just two or three years’ income. Today it is nearly 10.
Boomers used this unprecedented growth to acquire assets well beyond their needs, sitting on valuable housing stock — 28% of family homes in the U.S., for example — desperately desired by the next generation. Then they leveraged those assets to squeeze younger generations. In Australia, seniors’ investment in rental properties has increased 1,500% at the same time as rents have nearly doubled. Where boomers were able to buy property cheaply and grow their money in investments, young people today spend a vast percentage of their earnings on rent — which, more often than not, is passive income for elderly landlords.
The result is a generation that feels it has been actively held back from achieving the same or better lives than their parents had by that same generation’s relentless extraction of money. Today, Vanhuysse found, a working person in France can expect their lifetime wealth to be 17% lower than that of a baby boomer. “That’s the same difference as being, today in France, a parent of two or a parent of none,” Vanhuysse said, or “of being — hold on for this — a migrant in France or not a migrant in France.”
Far from demonstrating concern for their children, boomers have become the archetype of the hectoring elder, demanding young people live in grim austerity or else be accused of moral failing. Meanwhile, they have led the charge against any policies that would address this imbalance: cuts to pension funding, extensions of the retirement age, freezes on rent, ends to tax breaks on capital gains, the construction of new housing. They have insisted on their right to rent-seek, to economically stunt their own children’s generation. And worse, they have, where possible, actively enshrined this inequality in law.
In the last 10 years, we’ve witnessed the emergence of a two-tiered economy: one offering secure employment and benefits to senior workers and a select few entrants, and a precarious gig economy for anyone else. Nowhere is this clearer than in Italy, which deflated a staggering 42% youth unemployment rate by passing a law allowing for short-term contracts — but only for workers hired after 2014. Today, 40% of those under 29 struggle with precarious employment, compared to just 5% of those over 50.
“In the spasms across Europe, we are witnessing a generational uprising, a war on the reckless landlordism of the last propertied generation. They gouged too deep and for too long.”
Italy’s example is particularly stark, but this phenomenon plays out, with slight variations, across the Western world. As a union steward for Canada’s public broadcaster, I witnessed it firsthand: entrenched, often incompetent or disengaged elderly employees guaranteed healthy pensions and generous leave, enabled by the labor of an army of precarious young temps who were denied benefits, moved around and kept on exploitative short-term contracts, always hoping for some vanishing chance at security. The union fought tooth and nail to protect its incumbents; new workers, meanwhile, were expected to “do the time” in employment conditions that their elders had never been asked to endure.
The advent of AI and the ongoing liberalization of the marketplace have only added fuel to this dumpster fire, eliminating entry-level positions, complicating hiring with meaningless and time-consuming tests, and generally increasing the demands of employers. Those under 40 have probably lost count of the major economic disruptions they have been expected to adapt to (I can still remember when we were all being told to learn to code). Now, still working their way toward stable jobs, home ownership and families, they are bracing for a reality where, if AI doesn’t steal their jobs, it may well collapse the economy instead.
Amid all this chaos, young people have been largely left to fend for themselves. It’s no coincidence that the underfunding of schools prompted this outbreak of violence: Despite a staggering rise in the diagnosis of learning disabilities, classes are often crammed with more students per teacher than ever before. Ten percent of teaching hours go untaught in France because of chronic teacher absenteeism. Parents, too, have taken leave of their responsibilities. One of the possible defenses of Vanhuysse’s “asymmetric socialization” is that, while seniors benefit from wealth transfers via taxes, parents transfer wealth to their children in the form of time — the equivalent of up to seven months’ wages a year, Vanhuysse estimated. But can we really say that’s the case when Gen Z and Gen Alpha are partly defined by the countless hours they were left glued to a screen, largely unsupervised, the unfiltered internet doing untold damage to their psyches?
Elders and politicians love to blame social media for a worrying rise in youth extremism and violence. But that’s not the only cause of the dark, seething nihilism at the heart of the generations now coming of age. Stockemer calls it a “vicious cycle of political alienation”: politicians serve elderly interests, young people disengage from politics and the next government has even less motivation to address their concerns. It has reached the point that politicians openly talk about younger generations as though they are an enemy and treat them accordingly by suspending many of their rights. Italy’s far-right prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, has pioneered new methods in the overpolicing of the young: banning raves, lowering the age of criminal culpability and increasing juvenile detention by 50%. A communique from the October 17 Movement, one of the organizing groups behind Italy’s protests, captures the new reality: “A government that responds to the dissatisfaction of a generation with soldiers, handcuffs and decrees does not want to listen.”
But if governments won’t listen, why won’t the boomers who elect them? How can the outpouring of despair on the streets of Europe’s capitals not be enough to move them to cede some of their wealth to the next in line?
If it feels like theirs is a generation for whom no amount of money is enough, it may be because many of them genuinely feel that way, and for good reason. A lot of them grew up believing a millionaire was a rarefied thing. But now, a million dollars is barely enough to guarantee that a 65-year-old will spend their final years in comfort. The so-called “peak boomers” turning 65 between now and 2030 can reasonably expect to live another 20 years, and medical advancements may continue to extend their lifetimes. If they stop earning and investing, they will become victims of the same economic forces they unleashed on younger generations. High housing costs are preventing many seniors from downsizing as expected, high inflation is eating into the value of benefits and the side hustles and part-time jobs that once saved seniors from penury are scarcer than ever.
Looming behind this fear is the privatized eldercare market, which has become the norm in Europe as it has long been in North America. In European countries, the average home care starts at more than $1,000 per month and only climbs from there. Residential care can cost seniors or their families tens of thousands every year. The savings that were supposed to fund the “great wealth transfer” — the mass inheritance of more than $100 trillion in assets accumulated by boomers over their lifetime — are instead being siphoned away by an oligarchy of health care companies. No wonder medically assisted suicide is becoming more popular.
The reality is that neoliberal capitalism of the kind long championed by Macron has proven to be not very good at taking care of anyone except those now at liberty to make a lot more capital. The renowned French economist Thomas Piketty pointed out that the unprecedented 20% cut in per-student funding that prompted France’s protests came at a time when, according to some measures, “France has never been richer.” At the same time as public debt has ballooned out of control, the country’s privately held wealth has doubled in proportion to the country’s GDP, “with extreme concentration among the wealthiest financial fortunes.” “The problem to solve,” he wrote, “is simply one of distribution.”
In this way, these protests are revealing all sorts of new solidarities — not only between youth struggling to pay rent and seniors fearful of the cost of care, but between the disillusioned elite of European universities and the underpaid truck drivers of Italy, or the migrant teenager from the banlieues and the middle-class couples who can’t afford a child. All are part of the growing class of losers in the economy of today — an economy fatally consumed by presentism, unable and unwilling to consider the greater, long-term good.
Gerontocracy is certainly a contributor to that problem — after all, old people have less of a stake in the future. But in reality, the petty landlord milking tenants, the civil servant counting his days to retirement and the teenager looting Decathlon have much in common: They are all dogs fighting for scraps.
“Still working their way toward stable jobs, affording homes and having families, young people are bracing for a reality where, if AI doesn’t steal their job, it may well collapse the economy instead.”
This is perhaps the thing that earlier protesters in the historic youth uprisings in Nepal and India were able to see much more clearly than their counterparts in the more affluent regions of Europe, and may indeed be behind their relative success. Hopelessness is infectious, and we’re in a pandemic. There is little to separate a trucker who cannot pay for their gas from a student who cannot pay for their rent. Both are facing a profound existential crisis for which they bear little, if any, responsibility — a crisis their governments feel duty-bound to ignore.
It is in moments like this that the extraparliamentary politics of the street flourish. In some sense, this is a return to form for the politics of Europe. “We are quite used to the idea that everything should be oriented towards consensus,” Enrico Biale, an associate professor of political philosophy at University of Piemonte Orientale, told me. “Any form of strong protest is considered a challenge that needs to be contained aggressively.” But 50 years ago, discontented students flooded the ranks of the Red Army Faction and the Brigate Rosse, which terrorized fascist sympathizers (and plenty of bystanders) across the continent. In the ‘90s, Italy’s Pantera student movement paralyzed campuses and city centers over a bill to corporatize the universities; in the 1980s, French students did much the same. Those generations were closer to the violence of a real war, but they were arguably in no way as desperate as today’s youth.
That desperation had some of the analysts I spoke to on edge. There has been a different quality to these protests than past movements for change: a toxic mix of despair and nihilism. Many of those arrested for vandalism have no prior criminal record or connections to political movements. It’s unclear what, if anything, unites them, besides a complete lack of faith in conventional authorities and their processes. “We don’t trust the institutions of this government,” the October 17 Movement communique reads, and “we don’t trust the traditional political structures [which] have been trying to profit from and monopolize struggles for decades.”
This is the fruit of the short-termism natural to gerontocracy. And it is a boon to opportunists of all kinds — the criminal, the bigot, the fascist. Generational conflict is far more universal, and more inevitable, than a race war, and it has already become a recruiting tool for haters and nihilists of every description. Whether these protests, historic though they may be, result in any meaningful change is doubtful; Stockemer, for his part, is neither impressed nor optimistic. “There’s this big outbreak of rage,” he said. “Then we wait two years, and there’s another outbreak of rage.”
But with each chime of the futile clock, Europe’s youth becomes more disillusioned, and more radicalized. Eventually, that clock will run out — and then, no pension will be generous enough to spare the elderly their discomfort.
