A global youthquake is happening. Promises we made the young have been broken – and they know it

Anger and protest have put liberal democracy on trial. It’s vital to understand the rage that now unites a generation

We have not yet reached a 1968 moment, when students at the Sorbonne lit a fuse that detonated a crisis that eventually brought down the De Gaulle government. But in late 2026, starting with the symbolic act of young French people climbing the July Column at Paris’s Place de la Bastille, the world is experiencing the biggest outbreak of student demonstrations for 60 years.

When Italian students subsequently occupied a high school in Rome, they opened their demand for change with the words “like in France”. Youth demonstrations are now raging from India – where the government has responded with repressive force to the Cockroach movement – to Albania, where, after being out on the streets for nearly five months, students are demanding not only an end to corruption, but the replacement of the government.

But the most momentous set of protests has been in Serbia, where the Student List of candidates for national parliamentary elections has succeeded not just in dislodging a long-established, corruption-tainted government alleged to have links with organised crime, but in securing an electoral mandate. It is now poised to form a new administration. Nothing of this kind has ever happened before.

Student List is not only changing the political leadership of Serbia but popularising new methods of organising; it is building a system for selecting candidates from outside its own ranks, using methods such as open public assemblies with rotating delegates and specialised working groups. Eighty-five student assemblies selected the candidates, as an analysis of their internal rules explains. And the results are often surprising: the rector of Belgrade university, Vladan Djokić, was not selected as a candidate, despite being a longterm supporter of the movement and expected by many to play a major role in government.

Student List has been compared by the Croatian philosopher Srećko Horvat, who situates the movement within a longer tradition of direct democracy and collective self-organisation, to the Paris Commune of 1871. Its fundraising activites, however, are very much up to date: it reportedly crowdsourced almost €2m (£1.7m) from more than 26,000 individual donors during the election campaign.

The wave of youth protests comes after mobilisations in Kenya in 2024 and across Nepal, Indonesia, the Philippines, Madagascar, Morocco and Peru in 2025. How far the Serbian grassroots model of organising will shape youth movements elsewhere remains to be seen. But according to Olivier Ertzscheid, a senior lecturer at the University of Nantes, “young people’s sense of belonging and social interaction is at play”, with social media now actively fostering a sense of connection and shared identity among protesters – and driving momentum.

September and October have seen youth protests in Belgium, Austria, Greece and Italy over education funding; in Germany over the threat of compulsory military service; and in Spain and Portugal over the lack of affordable housing. But the protests have also spread well beyond Europe, to Indonesia, where youth demonstrations are focused on pollution; to Argentina over austerity; and to Chile and Colombia over funding cuts. Last weekend in Germany, a group called Gen Z regelt led demonstrations in 21 cities.

The protests will only intensify this month. In Australia, a big student demonstration is planned for 11 November, and student unions in Britain and Italy are planning a joint day of action protesting against the rising cost of education on 20 November.

Some years ago I wrote about a new generation of youth activists – of Bangladeshi schoolgirls campaigning against forced child marriage who had declared “child marriage-free zones”, and of Nigerian and other young people in Africa demanding their right to education. But the current youth rebellions are of a different order, breaking out in a new and more dangerous global environment and challenging authorities on issues well beyond education. Young people face an AI-led unemployment crisis; they lose out from the skewing of public spending towards older people, from restricted provision of education; they face a housing crisis and governments underplaying the importance of the climate emergency and intergenerational justice.

The youth jobs crisis will grow. The number of UK graduate jobs postings advertised on one big employment agency has declined from about 180,000 four years ago to 50,000 today. AI is thought to be a factor. Hi-tech employment of 18- to 24-year-olds declined by 30% between December 2019 and December 2025, whereas the sector itself expanded by 33% in that period. So as the government prepares to announce its review into youth employment, it is urgent we get nearly 1 million unemployed under-25s into work, giving priority to pre-apprenticeship training and restoring educational maintenance allowances, as well as radically reshaping a benefits system that is failing the younger generation.

But this is a worldwide problem. Because of ever-rising debt burdens and spiralling expenditures on defence and energy subsidies, governments are trapped in such a fiscal straitjacket that they will struggle to find the resources to meet young people’s aspirations. A large portion of public spending is captured by older generations, with schools and universities losing out as a result. Across the OECD, about half of health and social security spending goes to elderly people – those over 65 – despite them making up only 18.5% of the total population. In this tally, pensions are the biggest item, accounting for 38% – but an understandably high portion of all health spending goes to older people, too. And with young people now taking home a far smaller share of income than earlier generations, income and wealth gaps between young and old have widened.

It’s time to join the dots. Valérie Becquet, a sociologist at CY Cergy Paris University and co-author of Geopolitics of Youth: Engagement and (e)Mobilisation, warns that the protests are morphing into a wider social movement. “There are inequalities at all levels,” she says, “with gaps widening between different social groups.” The triggers for the demonstrations vary from country to country, but the basic complaint is strikingly similar. Young people believe that any promises that they would do better than their parents’ generation have already been broken – and that case is a strong one. Liberal democracy itself is now on trial.

Gordon Brown was UK prime minister from 2007 to 2010, and is United Nations special envoy for global education