The French government has to pay an interest rate of almost 5% to borrow for a 10-year term, more than Italy or Greece. The difference with what Germany pays, the risk premium, has climbed to 1.5 percentage points, more than double that in the case of Spain. Some investors fear that the situation could spiral out of control. How did we get here? Is the fear of a French debt crisis realistic? Could it drag down other countries in the euro zone like in 2012?

The images of young people smashing shop windows, looting stores and burning urban furniture in different French cities last weekend have given an electoral boost to Marine Le Pen, who aspires to take the Élysée in the presidential elections to be held in six months' time. "Dear vandals: you are the best campaign agents for Marine Le Pen," lamented the day after the riots the chronicler of Libération Luc Le Vaillant. "Your looting, your pillaging operations, your revolutionary 'reappropriations' are the best way to bring Le Pen to power. It makes one wonder if you are not the fifth column of the far right," wrote the journalist.

France has experienced a quiet night after days of riots and the chaos experienced during the weekend following the protest over the rising cost of living. Only a few unauthorized demonstrations in Lyon and Rennes, and the occasional scene of looting, have disturbed the calm. The bans on demonstrations and the curfews decreed in different cities have served to return –at least for now– to normality. Large cities such as Paris, Marseille, Lyon, Bordeaux, and Lille will maintain partial curfews for tonight. In the case of the capital, the curfew affects all citizens –including tourists–, the Place de la République, and the Les Halles commercial area, epicenters of the violent acts of recent days. Despite the return of calm, the social crisis is far from being resolved and tension will return to the streets this Saturday in a new day of protest called by the yellow vests movement.

“It is getting dark in the land of lights”. Someone wrote this on a window of a ground floor in a Paris street. What is happening is not a moment of collective rage, but the consequence of a presidential model absolutely detached from the citizenry. We can go into a thousand details and speculations, but the chaos that France is currently experiencing expresses the failure of President Emmanuel Macron. Six months before the end of his term, his political figure has run out of breath and is now only lashing out senselessly. It is the culmination of arrogance. Of a character who has not understood that the presidency of the Republic neither grants impunity nor is above the citizenry, to whom it must be accountable. And what has happened is that the president's insolence, the self-complacency that illuminates him, has created the sensation that France was neglected. And in part it is true. But above all, it is the inability to understand and address the concerns of the citizens that has trapped the president. And it seems as if he still does not want to realize it.

Images of destructive anguish and uncontrolled looting take the headlines of a much deeper decomposition sweeping across Europe. The massive mobilizations in France have brought together students, parents, teachers, unions, and yellow vests against the rising cost of living; against government proposals to cut pensions, delay the retirement age, and increase university fees; it is a protest against the lack of teachers, or the state of abandonment of many educational centers in the banlieues, which counted, for many weeks, on the peaceful participation of some mayors from the most affected localities. It is not just an intergenerational crisis, but also a generalized unrest against an increasingly unequal redistributive system.

The prime ministers of Hungary and Poland have linked the riots in France to immigration. And Donald Trump, too. He considers that the violence of these days “comes from people who come from a different world and carry hatred in their hearts”.

It is not just France. In Italy, Belgium, Germany, Albania, Greece, Portugal, and Spain, there are also protests underway. Most of the mobilizations have a common background: protesting against the rising cost of living. In the case of Italy, the protests have escalated this weekend in parallel to those in France. In the north of the country, the mobilizations have ended in riots, especially in Milan, where the police have arrested 271 people and the Prosecutor's Office has requested preventive detention for eleven protesters.

The week begins marked by the landscape after the battle this weekend in France.

Smashed shop windows, emptied stores, luxury bags disappearing in mass. On October 17th, several French luxury houses were looted during a day of social protests across the country. Dior, Celine, Hermès, Louis Vuitton… These are not just any shops, but temples of exclusivity, showcases of a sector that trades on distinction—and social inequality. The looting occurred in the context of the French student mobilizations, which demand more resources for public education, more teachers, better infrastructure, and more equal opportunities. But what does demanding quality public education have to do with looting a boutique of luxury?

France spent a quiet night from Monday to Tuesday, after several localities decreed nighttime curfews to try to curb the riots of the previous days. "The selective curfews have contributed to the tranquility of this night," stated Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu in a message on his social networks, adding that they will be repeated "where the situation requires it."

For a month now, French students have been blocking high schools and demonstrating in the streets. The protests began to demand more resources for the education system, but for days now, the students' demands have been a total amendment to Macronism and the austerity budget proposed by the executive of Sébastien Lecornu. This weekend, students and workers joined in a large mobilization across the country against the rising cost of living and the lack of response from the administration. The rage erupted with 90 demonstrations and more than 500 protests, which ended in serious riots across the country, vandalism of public buildings, and looting of shops. We speak with Oriol Bartomeus, director of the Institute of Political and Social Sciences at the UAB, about the political moment France is experiencing and the implications of the protests with only a few months left until the crucial presidential elections.

France woke up on Sunday in a state of shock after the riots caused a degree of destruction not seen for many years in the country's main cities, starting with the capital, Paris. The Parisian City Council has admitted that law enforcement was overwhelmed, on a day when between 550,000 and 800,000 protesters were counted across the country and there were about 2,000 arrests. The outburst of rage began to brew during student protests a few weeks ago and has quickly spread to other layers of society, who see their standard of living becoming lower and, in parallel, public services becoming weaker. The result is the shocking images of this weekend, with a town hall in flames, that of Limoges, and the looting of luxury shops in the heart of Paris in the face of police helplessness. A police force, by the way, that was also in the spotlight for the excessive use of force against students.

After Saturday's outburst of rage, tension between police and protesters returned to the streets of several French cities this Sunday. In Toulouse, Lyon, Rennes, or Lille, hundreds of people took to the streets again in protests organized through social media, and in Paris, some of the scenes that turned the streets of the French capital into a battlefield on Saturday were repeated. The epicenter was once again the Place de la République, and there were also renewed looting incidents in some shops, although fewer than during Saturday's events.

The day of mobilization in France to protest against the rising cost of living has left images of authentic chaos, violence, and clashes between protesters and police in Paris and other cities such as Marseille, Lyon, Bordeaux, Rennes, and Limoges. According to the organizers, 800,000 people have taken to the streets, a figure that the French authorities lower to 550,000. Across the country, more than 90 demonstrations and 500 protests were called, and many have ended in riots –especially serious in Paris–, on a day in which the police have arrested hundreds of people. Just in the metropolitan area of the French capital, there have been 855 arrests. Nationwide, the toll of detainees rises to 1,800 people, and there are 500 injured police officers.

In the eyes of the world, France is once again the sick man of Europe. It is nothing new in a country historically marked by labor conflict, political scandals, military defeats, and crises of all kinds, but at the same time, it is not good news that, in the current climate of student protests and a pre-election environment marked by the rise of the far right, fears regarding the viability of the country's public finances are now being added.

Now that thousands of French teenagers have taken to the streets to protest, the (quite comfortable) temptation has arisen to discuss the most spectacular images of the demonstrations and to hastily interpret who these young people are and what their protest means. We have seen it these days. The mobilizations are explained through the banlieues, immigration, the far-left or, directly, the racaille (which means scum, riffraff, but not only that, because it is a word with a specific political history in France, which returns periodically, when certain young people stop occupying the place that others have assigned to them).

Student protests in France are no longer just those of high school students. This Thursday, university students joined various demonstrations called throughout the French state, and more and more sectors are supporting the adolescents' mobilizations. Unions and student and teacher organizations have called for a new day of major mobilizations for October 13, and on November 5, the major French unions are also calling for a day of protest.

France has been experiencing historic student protests for three weeks. Students are blocking educational centers, clashing with the police, and thus paving the way for other sectors of the population who, suffocated by the cost of living and dissatisfied with the budget prepared by Sébastien Lecornu's executive, are pointing toward broader mobilizations throughout the French state during October.

France is experiencing this Tuesday the day with the most student protests since the mobilizations began three weeks ago, with 1,800 high schools without activity and demonstrations in the country's main cities. The protests focus on criticizing the precariousness of the education system, but in recent days, and especially in this Tuesday's call, they have taken on a more global dimension and some also gather the unrest of the population following the worsening of living conditions. For this reason, in this afternoon's mobilizations in Paris, in addition to students and educational staff, firefighters and farmers can also be seen.

A police grenade has left a 15-year-old student without his left hand and with part of his forearm amputated this Monday in Lens, in the north of France, amidst widespread protests against the situation of public high schools. The explosion occurred in front of a vocational training institute during clashes between students and police forces. The boy, originally from the neighboring town of Wingles, was rushed to the Lille Regional Hospital Center.