President Emmanuel Macron promised on Sunday night to make rioters pay for the looting and destruction that swept French cities over the weekend, Al Jazeera reported, as protests that began over the schools widened into a revolt against the cost of living and reshaped the race to succeed him in 2027.
Most of the hundreds of thousands who marched did so peacefully, Business Insider reported, but some protesters clashed with police officers, who fired tear gas. The authorities counted 550,000 marchers and 1,200 arrests; the unions put the crowds at 800,000. The movement began in mid-September with students demanding better schools, more teachers and a fairer system, then spilled out of the schoolyards.
“Those who have destroyed property must pay. Those who have looted must reimburse their victims. Those who sought to bring down the republic will be held accountable,” Mr. Macron said. He blamed “insurrectionists from fringe far-left groups, joined by numerous criminals” for the violence, spoke only briefly about the students’ demands and offered no new measures. Instead, he tasked Prime Minister Sebastien Lecornu with bringing together students, teachers, unions and elected officials to draft proposals in the coming days.
That was not what Yanis, 20, from Ivry-sur-Seine, just southeast of Paris, had hoped for. “He gave his usual ‘bla bla bla speech’ without putting forward anything concrete,” he told Al Jazeera. “We’ll be back on the streets anyway. There will be one demonstration after another until something changes — every weekend, without a break.”
The anger has hard numbers behind it. France’s monetary poverty rate reached 15.4 percent in 2024, the highest since INSEE, the national statistics agency, began annual records in 1996, or about 9.8 million people below the poverty line. Energy prices rose more than 60 percent between 2015 and the first half of 2026, and by April fuel cost 30 percent more than at the end of 2025, after the war in Iran and the Strait of Hormuz crisis. Eurostat, the European Union’s statistics agency, found that 28.8 percent of people in France could not cover an unexpected expense without borrowing in 2025, and that 41.1 percent had at least some difficulty making ends meet.
Mr. Macron’s approval rating stands at 15 percent, the lowest ever recorded, and the constitution bars him from running again after two terms. His presidency opened under the Yellow Vest revolt over fuel taxes; it is closing under another wave of street anger, and the next government will have little fiscal room to buy its way out. Last year’s deficit was 5.1 percent of gross domestic product, against a European Union average of 3.1 percent.
An OpinionWay poll for the newspaper Les Echos, published on Thursday, put Jean-Luc Melenchon, the leader of the left-wing party France Unbowed, first among voters aged 18 to 24 with 49 percent, up 10 percentage points from 2022. The party has embraced the student movement, and its program matches several of its demands, including education investment, teachers’ pay and the abolition of Parcoursup, the university application platform many students call opaque. Critics have accused the party of stoking the unrest; Mr. Lecornu said the extreme left was using the violence as a “warm-up round” for the election.
“I’m going to vote for La France Insoumise to counter the far right, the National Rally, and the centre, which is basically going to give us a repeat of Macron’s policies,” said Lydia, 21, a student at the Ecole du Louvre who joined a protest at the museum on Monday. She said she had no illusion the party would fix everything, and objected to what she called the demonization of the left: “It’s becoming rather exceptional to have empathy; it’s becoming something extreme left-wing.”
Marine Le Pen, whose National Rally leads the presidential race at 32 percent and stands second among 18-to-24-year-olds, has made the unrest a question of security and authority, accusing the government of losing control of the country and Mr. Melenchon’s side of feeding the violence. “Yesterday, you saw our cities, our streets, and our country mistreated, battered, and looted,” she said in a video message on Sunday night. Mr. Macron, she said, no longer has any “credibility or authority,” with the French caught between austerity “hammering” them and “insurrectionary activists” on the left — an argument meant to present her party as more capable than either, according to Al Jazeera.
“Candidates have no choice but to take a stand and address young people,” said Beligh Nabli, a professor of public law at UPEC-Paris XII, noting that the young vote at lower rates than those over 60, which pushes campaigns toward pensions rather than schools. Without this mobilization, he said, “it would have been business as usual.”