Why France Struggles to Meet Student Demands Amid Fiscal Crisis and Budget Cuts

On Saturday, France's Interior Ministry counted 410,000 people in the streets nationwide, 110,000 of them in Paris. Most were young, and they were marching over school conditions, the cost of living and a future they say the state is not investing in. It was the latest weekend of protests in a movement that began only weeks ago, and the government has struggled to answer it.

The protests started in mid-September, when high school students blockaded their campuses. Their complaints were specific: classrooms crowded with 32 to 35 pupils, teacher absences that went unreplaced, and decaying buildings. One placard read, "We have a future to build, not to endure." Teachers soon joined over pay. According to the OECD's Education at a Glance 2026 report, French teachers earn a gross 41,968 euros a year ($46,900), against 69,453 euros ($77,700) for German teachers. Social taxes, pension contributions and rising prices cut further into that income.

What began as a local dispute over school resources has since drawn in trade unions and civil servants. The anger is aimed at the government's proposed 54-billion-euro ($60bn) package of spending cuts and tax measures for the 2027 budget, which includes civil servant salary freezes. Young people also fear they will bear the brunt of the cuts, at a time of multidecade-high poverty rates and prices pushed up by the United States-Israel war on Iran. Amine Snoussi, a journalist at Le Media TV and a former parliamentary assistant at the National Assembly, described schools with cold, dirty buildings, some infested with rats, and teachers absent for more than six months without replacement. He said this was happening while thousands of teaching jobs are cut and public money keeps flowing to private schools.

The government's response has combined force and talk. Authorities imposed curfews and deployed police nationwide. President Emmanuel Macron blamed ultra-left groups for trying to "bring down the Republic" and warned that those involved in violence would be held accountable. On Friday he met student representatives for the first time since the protests began, but the meeting did not calm things; the students called for more mobilisation until concrete action arrives. In Marseille on Monday, Macron said he had asked the government to address the "legitimate demands at the root" of the movement. French media report that changes to Parcoursup, the national online university admissions platform, are expected.

The numbers explain why the room to move is narrow. Economist Lucas Chancel, co-director of the World Inequality Lab, found that public funding for higher education, student life and research, per student and adjusted for inflation, has fallen 20 percent since 2017. Meanwhile national debt has reached about 3.6 trillion euros ($4 trillion), or 119 percent of GDP, and the deficit is expected to hit 5.4 percent of GDP in 2026, well above the EU average of just over 3 percent. State spending takes roughly 57 percent of GDP, 14 percent of it for pensions. A government report seen by Reuters found that nearly a third of some ministries' budgets goes to retired civil servants' pensions. On October 7, Prime Minister Sebastien Lecornu said the anger among young people "didn't come out of nowhere" and promised a plan by the end of October, while asking ministers to watch spending.

Economists read the same figures differently. Thomas Piketty notes that private wealth has grown from 300 to 600 percent of GDP, heavily concentrated at the top, and concludes that France has never been richer and faces a problem of distribution. An OFCE review from January 2026 found that people over 60, a quarter of the population, hold 60 percent of the country's wealth. Macron has long been called the "president of the rich" for cutting the wealth tax, a policy he has defended, and his fuel tax set off the Yellow Vests protests of 2018. Antonio Fatas of INSEAD counters that France's system already redistributes about as much as its European peers. He points instead to years of limited growth and to political paralysis over reform, and warns that there is little room to simply spend the country out of trouble.

Piketty argues in Le Monde that reinvesting in education and health should come first. Snoussi puts it more bluntly: invest, or step aside. The test is the plan Lecornu promised by month's end, along with the expected Parcoursup changes, and whether students accept it or keep marching.