From students to violent and radical groups: who are the young people setting fire to the streets of Europe?

“What all these young people have in common is frustration,” Francesco Tucci, director of the Communication and Journalism Degree at the UPC, tells El Comercio. “It is a generation that suffers from job insecurity, rising costs of living, housing crisis, inequality, institutional distrust. Unlike their parents and grandparents, they have been left without any social parachute and will not enjoy quality public services,” he adds.

For Tucci, a factor that has set the stage for the anger of the new generations is that there is an incoherence between the strong liberal policy introduced by the European Union and the tensions of the welfare state. “Today the entire public system is being dismantled. What were considered acquired social rights are now moving back towards privatization with the current policy of the European Union,” he points out.

His position is shared by Rodrigo Murillo, a historian and international analyst based in France, who describes youth discontent as a symptom of the obsolescence of the European model.

“We see the decline of a social system that sought to finance everything with an inexhaustible source of wealth that finally ended up being exhausted. Basically, all the pillars on which the European model rested today seem to be shaky. Youth are protesting and rightly so,” he tells this newspaper.