Europe protests, Putin watches: anger and propaganda

There is a picture of Europe emerging in recent weeks that risks being both true and false at the same time. True: Paris is ablaze, stones are being thrown in Milan, water cannons are being deployed in Brussels, tens of thousands of people are protesting in Lisbon, Madrid is gripped by a rent riot, and Tirana is witnessing fierce clashes. False: based on the available information, there is no single ‘European uprising’, no coordinated movement or invisible hand that has simultaneously ignited the streets. The causes vary, but there is a common thread: a generation that finds it increasingly expensive to live, study, find a home and build a future, whilst perceiving state services as becoming less and less efficient.

The epicentre is France. The protests began amongst secondary school pupils, over a shortage of teachers and the condition of school buildings, before spreading to universities, trade unions, workers and former ‘yellow vests’. On Saturday 17 October, more than half a million people demonstrated in dozens of towns and cities, almost all of them peacefully. However, violent groups turned parts of Paris, Marseille, Lyon and Bordeaux into battlefields: Limoges town hall was set alight, shops were looted and the police were attacked. By Sunday, the Ministry of the Interior reported 2,400 arrests and nearly a thousand officers injured. The spark did not stem from geopolitics, but from schools, wages, prices and the decline in public services; the rise in fuel prices following the war in Iran added to the pressure. The government and France Insoumise are passing the blame for the violence back and forth.

Elsewhere, the picture is different. In Belgium, protests against cuts to education were influenced by events in France. In Milan, several hundred hooded individuals smashed shop windows and threw stones at the end of a march over the cost of living: it would be wrong to confuse those protesting with those looting, but it would also be wrong to treat the violent fringe elements as a mere footnote when they dominate the image of the entire day. In Albania, students are calling for the resignation of Edi Rama, who has alluded to an unspecified ‘foreign hand’ without any evidence having been made public. Portugal best illustrates the economic dimension. Tens of thousands of people marched in Lisbon, with inflation at 3.6 per cent and house prices having more than doubled since 2017. A 26-year-old researcher earning 1,300 euros a month risks seeing her rent rise from 716 to over 1,200 euros. She doesn’t need Vladimir Putin to convince her that there is a problem. The same applies to Spain, where the housing crisis has brought around 70,000 people onto the streets of Madrid. And so we come to Putin. There is no evidence that Russia has orchestrated this wave of protests. When the campaign about the ‘return of the Yellow Vests’ appeared on social media, the French news service Viginum investigated and concluded, according to Le Monde, that shares from abroad were extremely rare and reached a very small audience. But Moscow is not irrelevant. It does not need to invent a protest to profit from it: it simply needs to choose the right angle, gloss over the reasons and broadcast the chaos. Pro-Russian television stations and Telegram channels have highlighted the looting and arson in France as part of a narrative of a Europe in decline, and Kirill Dmitriev has spoken of the “suicide of Western civilisation”.

The technique is more parasitic than conspiratorial. The problems faced by protesters do not become false simply because Putin is pleased that they exist; rather, when a minority sets fire to a town hall or attacks the police, Moscow obtains perfect, free material to argue that democracies are weak, that governments are spending money on Ukraine whilst citizens suffer, and that authoritarianism guarantees more order than freedom. It would be giving him yet another gift to claim that the Kremlin is behind every rubbish bin set alight. The truth is both more disturbing and more useful: European anger is not manufactured in Moscow. It is manufactured in Europe. Moscow has learnt very well how to capture it on camera.

From France to Italy, from Belgium to Portugal, from Spain to Albania, different public squares are erupting at the same time. To understand what is happening, we need to bear in mind two facts: the protests are genuine, and someone is delighted to see them spiral out of control