German police deployed to protect plundered shops in Frankfurt
By Maya Ellison · Reporting from Detroit ·
When the ledger breaks and the state reaches for water cannons
When the ledger breaks, the men who hold the pens never pay the price. You see it in the hollowed-out classrooms. Students sit under peeling paint and look at walls that haven't seen a coat of varnish since the Berlin Wall fell. Sean Baker, a student at the Technical University of Berlin, told DW.com that campus rooms look like an abandoned building. Yet this is where a generation is told to study while the political class counts the pennies saved from starving the future. We watched this movie in 2008 when our block's houses vanished into foreclosure lists. We are watching it now across Europe as youth are handed the bill for a system that only knows how to hoard wealth at the top.
The 2010–2012 Greek protests involved a series of demonstrations and general strikes that took place across the country, provoked by plans to cut public spending and raise taxes as austerity measures in exchange for a €110 billion bail-out aimed at solving the Greek government-debt crisis. That is the exact mechanism at work here. The state guts the social safety net to satisfy financial elites, leaving the working class to bear the cost of a crisis they didn't create.
When tens of thousands of young people organized by the campaign group Gen Z regelt took to the streets on Saturday, demanding lower living costs, better education, and an end to compulsory military service, the establishment did not listen. They sent water cannons. DW.com reported that police used water cannons and pepper spray in Frankfurt, Hamburg, and Cologne. In Berlin, police broke up a demonstration after officers were attacked with stones, eggs, and bottles, leaving 27 police officers with injuries and up to 56 protesters temporarily detained, according to BBC.
The oldest trick in the book: turning economic desperation into a police blotter
The ruling class has only two responses when the ledger comes due. Ignore you until you starve, or criminalize you the moment you break a window. As DW.com reported, rioters in Frankfurt smashed shop windows with street signs and other objects. Rioters looted stores including stealing trainers, targeted a specialist firearms shop, set rubbish bins and streets on fire, and threw Molotov cocktails and incendiary devices at police. Nobody defends the looting of shops or throwing projectiles at emergency workers. But let us be clear about what the state is doing with those smashed windows. They are using them as a smoke screen to erase the very real desperation of a generation told they have no future.
Just look at how the politicians frame the unrest to protect their own skin. Roman Poseck, interior minister of Hesse state, rushed to invoke foreign specters, claiming that around 100 clearly identified left-wing extremists infiltrated the Frankfurt protest, according to BBC. Poseck stated that France must not be held up as a model. Poseck declared, "We all have those images from France in our minds - looting, burning houses, burning police vehicles, and attacks on police officers," as reported by RTE.ie. This is the Gilets jaunes playbook down to the last syllable. When a cost-of-living crisis sparks mass unrest, the state focuses relentlessly on the violence of rioters to delegitimize the underlying economic desperation and justify a heavy-handed security crackdown.
Education researcher Nina Kolleck from the University of Potsdam warned on DW.com that youth exclusion creates the impression that there is a policy for the old, but not for the young. Populist parties could exploit the political vacuum. That is the true danger. When Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s government offers nothing but continued cuts and piling further burdens upon the young—as 18-year-old speaker Steve told a Munich rally according to RTE.ie—they are manufacturing the very radicalization they pretend to fear.
Peace and freedom or war and coercion
The demands coming from the streets are not born of malice. They are born of survival. Lina Friedrich, spokesperson for Gen Z regelt, put it plainly in Berlin, stating they are there "to fight for peace and freedom, rather than for war and coercion." She added that "What matters most to us is better support for the health and education systems. We are against compulsory military service and we are in favour of a fairer distribution of the burden," as reported by BBC. These are the commonsense demands of a generation staring down the barrel of gig work, housing crises, and a heating planet, reading every news story against a ledger that never balances in their favor.
This fight belongs to every worker who has watched their wages stagnate while billionaires pay at a rate lower than the corner hardware store. Across Europe, youth-led protests regarding cost-of-living, housing, education quality, and public service cuts have erupted in France, Belgium, Ireland, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Greece, Serbia, and Albania, as documented by BBC. In Portugal, thousands marched against a rental bill that could worsen a housing crisis where house prices have more than doubled over the past decade. In France, more than 320,000 people demonstrated on the same Saturday against the high cost of living and poor public services.
The 2011 Chilean student protests showed how youth-led mobilization against the systemic underfunding and privatization of education can shake an entire nation. Occupy Wall Street named the concentrated interest of the financial elite as the cause of the burden placed on the vulnerable following the 2008 crash. Young people in Germany and across Europe are drawing those exact lines today. They know that a system prioritizing military conscription and corporate tax shelters over schools and hospitals is a system designed to fail them. We must stand with the youth demanding a livable future, reject the police-state posturing of interior ministers, and force the wealthy to pay their fair share.
Sources
- BBC: Shops looted as German cost of living protests turn violent
- RTE.ie: Shops looted as protests in Germany escalate
- DW.com: Germany's Gen Z protests disrupted by violence on Saturday
- BBC: Shops looted as German cost of living protests turn violent
- MyJoyOnline: Shops looted as German cost of living protests turn violent
- CNA: German rioters loot shops as ‘Gen Z’ protests turn ugly