Guardian Europe columnists Rokhaya Diallo and Alexander Hurst answered your questions about the recent protests in France, the role of the French police, foreign influence and the upcoming presidential election.
Michael Wolfcarius asks: I cannot understand why the Guardian is selecting dots instead of joining them. France may have developed into the big story for many reasons, many of which have yet to be discussed, but it is not the only place where seemingly small incidents grew into massive protests, some also quite violent; Spain, Italy, Serbia and Albania come to mind. The crystallising reason may be different but the conditions leading up to it are quite similar. Can you put all these events into perspective, context and relation? There are obviously underlying currents making it difficult for people to refrain from making themselves ‘heard’.
Rokhaya: I agree that these movements deserve to be considered together, while at the same time, recognising their different specific national contexts. Housing in Spain, living costs and public services in Italy and France, and corruption in Serbia and Albania are bringing people onto the streets. These concerns touch the foundations of a decent life and people’s ability to shape their future.
What connects them, in my view, is the widening gap between what people need and what political institutions seem willing to deliver. These incidents that have led to protests are not “small .” Serbia’s movement began after a deadly railway-station canopy collapse, which became a focus for anger over corruption and accountability. My reading is that these protests express a crisis of political responsiveness.
Alexander: I think people in all these places – Albania, Spain, France – feel that the political systems that exist aren’t capable of dealing with the sheer scale and nature of the crises facing us, and they’re responding to a sense of ‘loss of control’ (the Brexit campaign really did strike upon a brilliant slogan) over where their societies are headed. There is a general social sense that has flipped from “this is broken, but things can and will get better”, which gives people a stake in the institutions around them, to “this is broken and things can and will get worse”.
The impact of the arrival of AI has been understated. Not just on labour markets, or on the environment, but ontologically. The investment pitch of the most powerful companies in the world, the ones amassing trillion dollar valuations, isn’t just that X-subset of jobs are replaceable, it’s that human beings themselves are replaceable. That the things we do fundamentally don’t matter, and that their goal is to bring this into being. I think that feeling is there even if we don’t immediately put our finger on it in those terms.
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