Why is Europe so fed up?

It is nearly midnight and the sound of bongo drums is beating out across Paris’s Place de la Republique where several hundred people are drinking beer, smoking weed and - as one of their numbers says - “bearing witness”.Witness to what, exactly, is not immediately clear. The mostly young crowd is gathered under a banner that says “Nuit Debout” – which roughly translates as “Rise up at Night” – but beyond that there are few clues as to what unites the protesters gathered under the watchful gaze of several hundred riot police.

On March 31 they filled the square as part of a 400,000-strong workers’ protest against reforms to France’s rigid labour laws, but every night since then the Nuit Debout protesters have turned in a list of bewilderingly different causes.


A quick survey of the crowd reveals feminists, environmentalists, socialists, specie-ists (who oppose the tyranny of humans over animals), as well as an anti-Islamophobia caucus, political groups defending Palestinians and those still saying “non” to labour reforms.“It is about re-appropriating politics in general by the people, for the people,” says Yann Le Moullec, a 21-year-old linguistics student who volunteers for Nuit Debout, “we are united against oppression, whether men over women, humans over animals or workers over bosses.”Nuit Debout, which aspires to be a global movement, echoes other now-dissipated popular protests like America’s Occupy and Spain’s anti-austerity Indignados, with its influences ranging “from Marx to Marley”, according to a recent survey.

It could be dismissed as yet another failed fringe protest movement, but the people on the square share one unifying trait with tens of millions of people across the European Union: they are fed up.“Democracy is failing,” says Armand Degue, 21-year-old student studying city planning who, like many such protesters on the streets of Paris, Athens and elsewhere, is not the blue-collar, low-skilled victim of globalisation that you might expect.“I’m at the top of the pyramid: I’m an educated, white heterosexual with a good network. The world is made for me to succeed,” he said, “but even I am not sure about the next five years. I fear for myself and I fear for my country.”

As Europe endures what Michel Sapin, the French finance minister, has called the most prolonged period of economic stagnation and political upheaval since 1945, it is a fear for the future that can be felt from Athens to Amsterdam, from Warsaw to Watford. Statistically speaking, today’s Europe might well be enjoying what Barack Obama recently called the “most peaceful, most prosperous, most progressive era in human history” and yet, for all that, Europe is a continent demonstrably no longer at peace with itself.

http://s.telegraph.co.uk/graphics/projects/europe-ref-fed-up-vote/index.html

The French govt are trying to impose adverse changes to working rights/conditions of French workers...


The protests have been going on for a couple of months now.


While we are being (falesly) told that the EU is the instigator and protector of all that's good here in uk for our workers rights/conditions etc...


Why is the French govt trying to impose EU dictated changes onto the French workers that are changing their rights/conditions for the worse...!?