Images of riot police cloaked in tear gas, burning barricades in Paris, and furious demonstrators in Belgrade are flooding our screens. As the state’s monopoly on violence turns against its own citizens, cries of fascism and police states echo through the media.
What we are experiencing today is a volatile double-crisis: a completely justified breakdown of trust caused by systemic police failures and heavy-handed blunders, running parallel to a massive global economic storm slamming into the continent.
The Visual Drama of a Fractured Continent
When tensions in the streets hit a boiling point, they are captured on mobile cameras and broadcast globally in seconds. In recent years, two viral videos from the French “Yellow Vests” protests have illustrated exactly how fractured society has become.
The first shows riot police removing their helmets in the city of Pau, a rare moment of de-escalation where police and protestors found a temporary, fragile truce through singing the national anthem. The second shows former French boxing champion Christophe Dettinger, who out of sheer desperation and anger, boxes against a wall of heavily armed police on a bridge in Paris to protect demonstrators.
Both videos tell the same story: the people feel that the authorities are no longer on their side, pushed to the brink by the actions of law enforcement itself.
This intense anger against law enforcement and authorities has deep historical roots. We need look no further back than December 1986, when 22-year-old economics student Malik Oussekine accidentally stumbled into a student protest in Paris.
He was not even participating, yet he was chased into a building foyer and beaten to death by a notorious motorcycle unit of the French riot police. Malik became a lasting symbol of state overreach and institutional violence. Back then, the government was forced to capitulate, the education minister resigned, and the contested reform was withdrawn.
However, the wound in the French public psyche never fully healed, and today we see the exact same explosions directed at the authorities, not just in France, but across a fractured continent. We see it in post-Brexit Britain, where over 100,000 people recently clashed with police in London.
We see it in Italy and Albania, where students and youth are setting the streets ablaze over failing public systems. And we see it in Spain and Portugal, where tent cities rise against an unpayable housing crisis, while crowds in Prague fight to protect public media from midnight state cuts.
The geography changes, but the core cry remains the same: the social contract is broken, and institutional missteps have shattered any remaining good faith.
It’s About the Wallet, Not the Batons
Running parallel to this institutional anger is a severe material crisis. History has shown us that when people suffer financially, their fury must be directed somewhere. We have endured years of inflation, energy crises, and a soaring cost of living, and ordinary Europeans feel their economic security crumbling.
An unexpected but brilliant indicator of this can be found on the stock market: the share price of the luxury giant LVMH (Louis Vuitton Moët Hennessy) has experienced dramatic drops. When even the ultra-wealthy curb their spending and the luxury market falters, it is an undeniable sign that the global economic engine has stalled.
Our Modern “Let Them Eat Cake”
When the elite in their gilded halls respond to this crisis with technocratic explanations and complicated subsidy schemes, they appear just as out of touch as Queen Marie Antoinette on the eve of the French Revolution. Her famous, alleged quote to the starving populace, “Let them eat cake”, is a perfect description of today’s political helplessness.
Telling a worker who cannot afford petrol to “just buy an electric car” is our era’s equivalent of offering cake when the people lack bread. The distance between those who make the decisions and those who feel inflation in their daily lives has rarely been wider.
The Historical Law of Economic Uprisings
This is a historical law of nature. During the February Revolution of 1848, the French economy collapsed following poor harvests and sky-high unemployment. The tax burden on the poorest increased, and the elite refused to share power. The result? The people rose up, barricaded the streets, and overthrew France’s very last king, Louis-Philippe I.
The spark spread like wildfire across Europe in what became known as the “Spring of Nations.” Then, as now, economic distress and an arrogant elite triggered the social explosions.
Captains in a Global Hurricane
Today we face the same pattern, but with a deeper and more uncomfortable realization: it does no good to change the captain when the entire ship is caught in a global hurricane.
Many hope that if Emmanuel Macron resigns, or if right-wing populists like Marine Le Pen take the helm, things will be resolved. But a politician in Paris, London, or Belgrade does not control the US Federal Reserve’s interest rates, global supply chains, or international energy markets. The entire world economy is blowing a hurricane that cuts right through all national borders.
Populists often win elections by promising simple solutions to complex problems, but once in the corridors of power, they are trapped by the exact same invisible economic walls. When economic promises shatter and public frustration grows even further, governments, regardless of their political color, are left empty-handed.
The police violence and the dark scenes we witness in European streets today are not a sign of state strength. They are the state’s desperate and dangerous attempt to suppress the symptoms of a disease for which they do not hold the cure.
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