France took to the streets on October 17, 2026 and, between demonstrations, fires and looting, certified the death of Macronism. He did it with violence, as he usually does. Rage, anger and also fear of the future. And what he witnessed while destroying businesses and burning town halls and police stations was the demise of a political idea that wanted to establish a radical ideological centrality and contain the rise of extremes. Instead, there were nine years in which public services were emptied, the debt multiplied (it went from 98% of GDP to the current 119%) and the ideological poles in Parliament swallowed up the public debate until they were today the two political forces – the leftist La Francia Insumisa (LFI) and the far-right National Regroupment (RN) – with the best chance of reaching the second round in next spring's elections.
On Saturday, all those who have long feared the arrival of the end of the month and those who, furthermore, fear the end of the world, met in the streets and roundabouts of France. Or, at least, the world his parents lived in.
Macron, who a few hours before the announced protest went to see Céline Dion's concert with his wife, came to power when he was 39 years old. He was young, smart and arrogant. Neither left nor right, he announced the construction of his political story. It was necessary to introduce fluidity in the economy and flexibility in the labor market. Macron knew that world, he came from banking. He understood money. But he had grown up in the Socialist Party and was also aware of the need to preserve certain balances, impart social justice, and heal identity fractures. Grease the social elevator that drove public education. But none of that happened.
France is more fractured than ever and the extreme right, which Macronism sought to marginalize, finds itself at the gates of the Elysée for the first time since World War II: polls give it 35% voting intention in the first round of the elections. "It is the end of a reign with great decomposition. There are echoes of 1968, when the end of Gaullism was also reached. The student protest is an unexpected movement that the Government saw coming, but could not imagine the magnitude. Furthermore, another dangerous aspect for Macron is that there is no money in the box. And that breaks the golden rule of a social crisis: pay," explains the journalist and biographer of the President of the Republic, François-Xavier Bourmaud.
The head of state promised to reverse a society governed and designed by and for boomers, the generation born between 1946 and 1964. He had it all. In the last presidential elections he obtained the majority vote of the generation between 25 and 34 years old. Only five years later, thirty-somethings despise him, according to Ipsos-BVA polls, and lean towards any other political option. In the 2024 legislative elections, less than one in ten young voters supported a candidate from the presidential bloc.
Macron always surrounded himself with young collaborators. But it didn't help him understand them. In June 2025, on the sidelines of a G-7 summit, he confessed to the writer Emmanuel Carrère that “he has never been a teenager” and that he does not “like” or “understand” teenagers. “Macron's France”, as it is defined in the student protests, has turned its back on young people. The average age of television consumption in the country (France 2 and France 3) is 60 years. The advertising story of the large consumer segments is not for them: the age at which one can afford a new car is 55 years. On Saturday, nine out of ten arrested for the altercations were minors.
The deterioration of public accounts, the slowdown in growth and the increase in unemployment have made that ideal obsolete, to the point of rekindling a generational conflict. Few candidates dare to openly defend the interests of young people, who abstain from voting to a much greater extent than older people.
The protests no longer reach only the problem of pensions nor do they come from the upper generation, an obsession of his two mandates. Today, that is the disturbing thing, there is no interlocutor. Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu does not know if he will survive the budget debate in the coming weeks. The President of the Republic has barely referred to the conflict these days and, six months after being relieved, he is already a figure of little authority. “This is the final crisis of Macronism,” insists Bourmaud. "The student movement already resonates like that of the yellow vests in the first term. But it is even more surprising that it occurs months before a presidential election, when these phenomena never occur. Protests usually arrive after a reform or a few months after an election due to some disillusionment. The periods before an election are usually calm."
The Executive knows that it will not be able to satisfy its economic demands. The background landscape trivializes this type of effort. The Bank of France has lowered its growth forecast for 2026 to a range between 0.4% and 0.5%, well below the 1% it was forecasting at the end of 2025, and raised its inflation forecast to 2.5% for this year, almost one point above what was calculated months ago. The entity itself admits that this lower growth, combined with the increase in debt, will push the public deficit to 5.2% of GDP in 2026, compared to 5.1% in 2025. A cocktail that raises public debt to 119.8% of GDP.
Political scientist Pascal Perrinau believes that France is going through “a crisis of political confidence.” "The disillusionment in the political system is enormous. The president breaks records of unpopularity, the prime minister fails to approve the budget. The French have the impression that they cannot expect anything from politics and that the system is completely jammed. Young people are the spokespersons for a malaise and a demand that they also share with parents. And he announces a presidential campaign that will oscillate between indifference and support for the protest parties: the National Rally and La France Insoumise," he warns.
The radical left of LFI, led by the vehement Jean-Luc Mélenchon, is the only one capable of entering the demonstrations and politically channeling the anger of the students (it has 40% voting intention among those under 35 years of age). And Marine Le Pen's far-right RN appears as the formation capable of restoring order and law. "Macron promised that this idea of being neither on the right nor on the left would marginalize the RN. But the extreme right has never been as strong as today. We are objectively in a moment of end of reign. The president is at the end of his mandate, he cannot present himself and Macronism faces its destiny: to be a parenthesis in history," insists Perrineau.
The problem goes much further. Violence and a sense of chaos have taken over the streets. Saturday's scenes of looting, ultraviolence and sabotage have gone around the world. Some 300 high school students have been injured, along with 150 educational personnel and 900 members of law enforcement since the start of the movement. This human balance is accompanied by 9,000 police arrests, of which 85% correspond to minors, and thirty investigations entrusted to the General Inspection of the National Police (IGPN), the body in charge of investigating possible police irregularities.
Manuel Valls, former Prime Minister and former Minister of the Interior during the mandate of François Hollande, believes that the State is now “very weak.” "Never have the protesters, the street, had the feeling of confronting a State and a political power so fragile. So incapable of standing up and looking for solutions," he points out. "The power vacuum is tremendous and warns, with all the symptoms, like a police in crisis, the role of LFI and the yellow vests, that the Titanic is sinking. The situation favors the two extreme forces: the RN and LFI," explains Valls on the phone.
