France’s School Riots Expose a Crisis Far Beyond Broken Classrooms

Student protests over deteriorating schools, despite billions of euros in public education spending, are becoming part of a wider French crisis. Experts say the unrest reflects the country’s worsening finances, President Emmanuel Macron’s weakened political center and the growing influence of radical movements, taking the demonstrations well beyond their original focus on education.

Simone Rodan-Benzaquen, the Foundation for Defense of Democracies’ senior envoy for Europe, told News Media in an interview from Paris that the protests began in September with valid complaints about school conditions. Since then, she said, political groups seeking a confrontation with the state have increasingly taken advantage of the discontent.

“Overall, I’d say the anger is real, but the violence, I would say, is organized,” she said, arguing that vandalizing or destroying schools would not improve France’s education system.

Salaries, social contributions and pensions for teaching and non-teaching staff accounted for 72% of education spending, while only 8.5% was directed to investment, including infrastructure and equipment. The figures cover France’s entire education system rather than high schools alone, according to France’s Education Ministry’s 2026 statistical overview.

Harvey Feigenbaum, a George Washington University professor of political science and international affairs who studies French politics, said the country is struggling to balance costly social commitments, weak economic growth and mounting demands to reduce government spending.

“France is in deep debt. It wants to cut its expenses,” Feigenbaum said. He added that years of fiscal strain, combined with neglected school buildings, have intensified frustration among students.

The depth of France’s financial challenge is reflected in its debt burden. Eurostat reported that French public debt reached 117.6% of gross domestic product in the first quarter of 2026, the third-highest level in the European Union after Greece and Italy.

Reuters reported Oct. 8 that higher borrowing costs and growing investor concerns have sharply reduced the government’s ability to calm unrest with new spending, an approach used during earlier waves of French protests.

That financial pressure is unfolding alongside an increasingly fractured political landscape, giving parties on both the left and right opportunities to harness public anger.

Macron’s political center collapses

Feigenbaum said many of the crisis’s deeper political roots can be traced to Macron’s legacy.

After winning the presidency in 2017, Macron pledged to break with France’s traditional left-right divide. His goal was to combine policies from both camps within a new centrist political movement.

Instead, Feigenbaum said, the strategy weakened France’s established moderate parties without building a stable governing coalition capable of replacing them.

“What he ended up doing was attracting the moderate voters from the parties of the moderate left and the parties from the moderate right, and essentially destroyed those parties,” Feigenbaum said.

The disintegration of the traditional center, he said, opened additional space for movements with more polarized and uncompromising positions. 

“Macron is a smart man, but he’s a terrible politician,” the professor said.

Macron’s contentious pension reforms demonstrate how difficult it is to convince French voters to accept cuts to long-standing public benefits, Feigenbaum said. The changes prompted widespread protests, and implementation of the 2023 retirement reforms has since been suspended until 2028.

The political challenge intensified after Macron called snap parliamentary elections in 2024. The vote produced a sharply divided National Assembly, leaving no bloc with a governing majority.

“Even if the government wanted to do something coherent, they simply don’t have the votes to do it,” Feigenbaum said.

That paralysis has left Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu handling the immediate unrest while Macron faces questions about the stability of the political system he helped reshape.

Why are France’s schools struggling despite billions in spending?

The protests began in the Paris suburbs in September amid complaints about overcrowded classrooms, inadequate heating and cooling, aging buildings and teachers who were not replaced when absent.

Rodan-Benzaquen said the anger reflected years of educational instability, frequent ministerial changes and reforms that have failed to resolve persistent school problems.

She also pointed to a broader sense of anxiety among young people about their economic future, artificial intelligence, climate change and international conflicts.

According to the OECD’s September 2026 Education at a Glance report, France spent $16,674 in funding per student in general upper secondary education in 2023, compared with an OECD average of $12,421, adjusted for purchasing power.

Yet teachers and students continue to complain about basic shortages.

Responsibility for public high school buildings and equipment falls to regional authorities, while the national government oversees much of the education system, including teacher staffing.

Feigenbaum said France’s centralized education structure makes national leaders the focus of public anger when schools fail to deliver.

The pressure has already forced a concession.

Reuters reported Friday that Education Minister Édouard Geffray announced an emergency plan to deploy 3,000 qualified educators to particularly affected schools, costing several dozen million euros.

Student unions welcomed the measure as an initial victory but pledged to continue demonstrating.

The spending figures raise broader questions about whether France’s financial and political priorities have left sufficient resources for maintaining school infrastructure and meeting students’ needs. They do not, however, establish that teachers’ unions or other organized constituencies have improperly diverted funding.

MUST READ: Meghan Markle and Princess Eugenie’s Bond Survived Awkward Moments

How the far left entered the unrest

As the demonstrations expanded, the involvement of France’s hard-left La France Insoumise party, known as LFI, led by Jean-Luc Mélenchon, became an increasingly contentious issue.

Reuters reported Oct. 1 that French intelligence agencies had told a government crisis meeting that LFI and affiliated activists played a role in fomenting the unrest. Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez also cited agitators moving between schools to encourage violence.

LFI has denied responsibility and accused authorities of aggravating tensions through their response.

Rodan-Benzaquen said far-left movements were capitalizing on students’ frustration.

“There is an obvious instrumentalization, obvious manipulation,” she said, arguing that activists were seeking to push some protesters toward violence.

She linked the unrest to what she described as Mélenchon’s broader political strategy ahead of France’s 2027 presidential election.

“His idea is that, on the one hand, he will scare voters on the right and on the far right, who will then go to vote for the far right, and, on the other hand, he would mobilize his own camp,” she said.

Rodan-Benzaquen argued that intensifying political confrontation could help Mélenchon consolidate his support among younger voters and immigrant communities, while portraying the far right as an increasingly serious threat.

She described it as a calculated political strategy rather than a spontaneous response to students’ concerns.

The involvement of LFI politicians has been documented by French media, although there is disagreement over whether the party helped initiate the demonstrations or became involved after the protests began.

An Oct. 2 investigation by Le Monde examined a police intelligence assessment describing radical left activity around schools in Seine-Saint-Denis but questioned whether the evidence established that the movement itself was politically orchestrated.

Feigenbaum offered a more cautious interpretation, describing some of the violent perpetrators as fringe provocateurs who exploit broader demonstrations without necessarily directing them.

“They’re not being organized by some, you know, some mastermind at the national level, at least as far as anyone knows,” he said.

Islamist influence or political solidarity?

The demonstrations have also raised questions about whether Islamist groups and pro-Palestinian activists are seeking to use the unrest to advance broader ideological causes.

Rodan-Benzaquen argued that Mélenchon’s emphasis on Gaza and the Palestinian cause has helped bring together political constituencies that might otherwise have little in common.

“It’s sort of the idea of sort of an intersection of different movements where they manage to bring together the different groups, the far left, Islamist movements, pro-Palestinian activists,” she said.

She pointed to Palestinian flags appearing during the demonstrations as an indication of how the movement has expanded beyond its original educational demands.

The FDD expert argued that Islamist elements were attempting to capitalize on the turmoil, although she cautioned against reducing the entire crisis to immigration or religion.

“But this goes far beyond the issue of immigration. It goes far beyond the issue of Islamism. It goes far beyond the issue of Islam,” she said.

A crisis France cannot simply spend its way out of

The government’s latest concessions have not ended the protests.

According to Reuters on Friday, 141 schools remained closed while students continued demanding broader reforms. Nearly 10% of teaching hours in French public high schools remained unstaffed.

For Rodan-Benzaquen, one of the greatest dangers is that the demonstrations reflect a society increasingly divided into competing political realities.

She described how her 17-year-old son created separate left-wing and right-wing Instagram accounts and encountered radically different portrayals of the same unrest, one emphasizing police violence and the other violence by protesters.

“Now, if you live in two drastically different realities, it is very complicated to come to any form of dialog and end agreement,” she said.

Her warning extends beyond France’s current protests.

“We are in an extremely polarized environment,” Rodan-Benzaquen said, noting that social media can deepen divisions and allow confrontations to escalate rapidly.

Feigenbaum sees an additional structural danger of a government burdened by accumulated financial obligations and deprived of the political consensus needed to reform them.

The result is a country spending heavily to sustain its public institutions while struggling to deliver the services citizens expect and a political system increasingly consumed by conflict over how to fix them.

What began as a rebellion against broken classrooms has become a test of whether France can reconcile its costly promises with its financial reality before the divisions consuming its schools deepen further.