“Sad to hear some people in India are as stupid as the Trumpists,” says Thomas Piketty

Rockstar French economist Thomas Piketty, whose work on income inequalities has stirred global debate since he wrote his stellar work, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, in 2013, has expressed shock at a section of mainstream media in India describing the protests in his country as a manifestation of Islam.

“Apart from the crazy Trumpists, who do not know anything about Europe or about anything, nobody has been saying that the mobilisation of high schoolers and students has anything to do with Islam.... It is sad to hear that some people in India are as stupid as the Trumpists,” the 55-year-old professor of economics at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (EHESS) and author told Open.

His response came to a question on western mainstream media coverage of the October 17 protests in Europe, particularly in France, where the blame had been laid primarily on non-white French citizens, a stand that has been echoed by Indian mainstream media.

Piketty, who has described the current movement in France as one that “marks the twilight of Macronism” in his recent Le Monde op-ed, has also noted in his write-up that young people are asking for one simple thing: resources to get an education and access to quality studies. “In doing so, the current protest highlights what is undoubtedly the most glaring failure of the current government: a catastrophic and unprecedented 20% drop in the budget per student since 2017,” wrote Piketty, who also holds the associate chair at the Paris School of Economics (PSE) and is Centennial Professor of Economics in the International Inequalities Institute at the London School of Economics (LSE).

The renowned economist who acquired his PhD aged 22 also argued that in France, “hundreds of thousands of young people work hard to earn their high school diplomas, but there is nothing planned to welcome them into higher education”. He also highlighted how, to make matters worse, “the shortage of places in higher education has been managed with the utmost opacity and with an incomprehensible algorithm (Parcoursup), despite repeated calls from students, families, teachers and researchers to change the system”.

Parcoursup is an online platform the government introduced in 2018 to determine where pupils go after finishing secondary school – which they claim results in unfair selection. Critics have defined Macronism as policies pursued by French President Emmanuel Macron that serve the powerful and restore elite power.

The recent protests started in Créteil in the southeastern suburbs of Paris located 11.7 km from the city centre. Fanny, a resident of Bastille who works in the pharmaceutical sector and spoke to Open, said that the protests were mishandled by the government, which dispatched militarised police, with “dangerous” battle gear (batons, tear gas grenades, etc), who beat up minors. According to Fanny, herself a Gen Z protestor, “High school students started protesting because they want more teachers and decent facilities to study – heating, clean schoolrooms without cockroaches, rats and so on. Then the protests spread to universities too, where students are saying that the world we live in makes it really hard for young people to picture a future, and that the government keeps cutting funding for education, welfare, hospitals, everything.”

She argued that the protests would have stayed peaceful if the police had not targeted the minors for brutal crackdown. “They are stopping marches from starting off, which is illegal in France. In the middle of all this, there are people taking advantage to smash things up, but they are a tiny minority compared with peaceful protesters. The far-right media are projecting all young people as troublemakers when it is the police that is extremely violent, from what I saw around me,” Fanny noted, emphasising that all of this is a backlash from the people after 10 years of Macron’s policies “which have done nothing but make people poorer”.

Such rage and anger, especially of young people, are visible from across the streets of Paris and other French cities and towns to many other parts of Europe, including Italy, Belgium, Spain, Portugal, Albania, Greece and Ireland – countries where austerity measures have made things tough for a large section of people. In some other countries, austerity measures were put in place to promote high defence spending. A section of analysts has blamed Macron for accelerating France’s military spending which is expected to touch €64 billion in 2027, doubling from €32 billion in 2017, and for focusing on an “unwinnable” war against Russia at the expense of French people’s welfare.

Speaking to Open, Paris-based travel guide Quentin Gubourg said that things are not as black-and-white as a section of the foreign mainstream media reports of the events in France. “Student protests are justified and while the looting and destruction are regrettable, how the leadership of France miscalculated the protests and failed to pacify protesters also needs to be focused on. Policies of the Macron government failed our youth. Then they protested. If I were a minor, I would have done the same.” He said that he doesn’t see any religious angle to the protests although a section of the media has lapped it up, suggesting that the use of Palestinian flags in the protests was proof of that. Certain analysts and reporters have also alleged that the ultra-Left in France, La France Insoumise (LFI), was using this violence as an electoral strategy in the run-up to the 2027 presidential elections -- which they deny.

Meanwhile, reporting by independent media groups in France, for example, Mediapart, does not suggest any such religious assertion and states that reducing protests to that argument helps only those in power whose misgovernance precipitated matters even as the debate continues over what sparked the violence and who were involved.