Pages

1 July 2022

France’s Youth Aren’t Apathetic. They’re Angry

Eraldo Souza dos Santos

Three days after the first round of the French presidential elections in April, students occupied the Sorbonne University building in Paris. Their banners and posters displayed a recurrent slogan: “Neither Macron nor Le Pen,” referring to center-right President Emmanuel Macron and far-right leader Marine Le Pen, who passed through to the second-round vote in a rematch of their 2017 contest.

As police cleared the building after 30 hours of occupation, both presidential candidates vehemently criticized the demonstration. But the protests quickly spread, with students across France expressing their dissatisfaction at having to once again choose between candidates from the center-right and the far right, when they and other voters younger than 34-years-old had overwhelmingly opted for Jean-Luc Melenchon, the candidate of the leftist party France Unbowed, in first-round voting.

No comments:

Post a Comment