Education Protests in France and Belgium: How School Cuts and Tuition Hikes Triggered Europe's New Anti-Austerity Wave

Education is particularly exposed because the gap between a ministry’s spreadsheet and a classroom is immediate. A reduction in spending can mean one fewer teacher, a more crowded class, an unrepaired building or another hour added to a teacher’s workload. A tuition increase arrives directly in a household budget.

That makes education an unusually powerful test of how far European governments can push austerity without provoking resistance that extends beyond the original group affected.

The Belgian arithmetic reaches the classroom

Belgium provides the clearest illustration of the mechanism.

The Wallonia-Brussels Federation adopted a €500 million austerity package on June 5, designed to reduce an annual deficit of €1.6 billion in 2026 to €1.2 billion. The package is intended to generate savings through 2029, but some of its most politically sensitive measures have landed immediately on students and teachers.

For about 58 per cent of university students, the maximum annual tuition fee is rising from €835 to €1,194 under a new four-tier income system. Scholarship students remain exempt, while other students fall into bands of €374, €835 or €1,194.

For a government balancing a regional budget, the change is a revenue measure. For a middle-income household, it is a new recurring cost attached to a basic route into higher education.

That distinction helps explain why the dispute quickly moved beyond tuition.

Secondary teachers in grades four to six are also being asked to increase their teaching load from 20 to 22 hours a week without additional pay. The package includes tighter sick-leave controls, reduced end-of-career benefits and cuts to free school supplies, alongside higher transport costs and already crowded classrooms.

The political risk is that separate measures begin to reinforce one another. Students see education becoming more expensive while its quality and conditions appear to deteriorate. Teachers see additional work imposed while employment conditions are tightened. What might have remained a collection of individual grievances becomes a common argument about who is being asked to absorb the cost of fiscal repair.

By October 5–7, protests in Liège had escalated into clashes, arson and property damage. Police used tear gas, and the city reported 107 arrests since the beginning of the month, including 27 judicial arrests. Eighteen police officers were reported injured. Authorities imposed a ban on outdoor gatherings of more than three people until October 16 and temporarily closed Liège Central Station.

The violence has given the government a second problem: how to defend fiscal policy while separating legitimate protest from disorder.

Education Minister Valérie Glatigny has defended the austerity measures as necessary to guarantee teachers’ salaries and urged students to return to class. Foreign Minister Bernard Quintin has alleged that far-left activists helped drive the unrest, while the Liège Antifascist Front rejected the claim.

Those disputes matter politically, but they do not resolve the underlying arithmetic.

France faces the same squeeze on a larger scale

France’s protests are broader and more politically consequential.

For three consecutive weeks, high-school students and teachers have blockaded schools, erected barricades and demonstrated in more than 40 cities, including Paris, Nantes, Rennes, Marseille and Toulon. More than 266,000 people joined demonstrations nationwide on Tuesday.

The immediate trigger is not a single reform. It is years of deterioration in secondary education: ageing and unsafe infrastructure, staffing shortages, overcrowded classrooms and difficulties finding replacement teachers, including in core subjects such as mathematics and English.

Those problems have accumulated in working-class suburban schools in particular, turning what might once have been a question of maintenance into a broader perception of institutional abandonment.

The government is now attempting to respond without losing control of the fiscal narrative.

Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu has promised “concrete, quick, and fully funded responses” by the end of October. Yet the government's room for manoeuvre is constrained by France’s budget deficit and rising sovereign borrowing costs. The same state that is being asked to repair schools is under pressure to convince bond markets and European institutions that it can control public finances.

That is the central contradiction behind the protests.

A government can acknowledge the deterioration of public services. It can even agree that spending is required to repair them. But finding money for that spending becomes politically difficult when debt-service costs are rising and other emergency demands are competing for the same resources. France has already had to reallocate substantial resources during 2026, including €2 billion in interest-free loans and a €1.3 billion emergency package for farmers following heatwaves.

Lecornu therefore faces a problem that cannot be solved by promising more money alone.

The promise itself creates expectations. Delivering it requires choices elsewhere.

When social dialogue gives way to policing

The response to the protests also reveals another shift.

France suspended the use of stun grenades on October 7 after a 15-year-old protester lost a hand, while maintaining a police presence around demonstrations. In Belgium, Liège has resorted to restrictions on public gatherings and measures affecting businesses and transport.

These are understandable responses once demonstrations produce injuries, fires and property damage. But they also risk changing the character of the dispute.

A conflict that begins over teachers’ workloads or tuition fees becomes a question of public order. Students who entered the streets over education policy encounter riot police. Municipal authorities close transport hubs and restrict gatherings. Governments increasingly have to manage the consequences of protest rather than negotiate the conditions that produced it.

That can buy time. It does not remove the fiscal pressure underneath the confrontation.

Nor does it explain why students and organised labour have found common ground so quickly.

Portugal offers a telling parallel: teachers have launched an indefinite strike over unpaid work beyond the statutory 35-hour week. In Ireland, university students are protesting tuition costs alongside housing shortages and transport fares. In Spain, student actions have combined education concerns with the burden of youth housing costs.

The grievances differ. The pattern is recognisable.

The protest is crossing borders because the problem is shared

There is no evidence in the briefing of a single organisation coordinating the protests across Europe. The spread from France into Belgium therefore should not be mistaken for proof of centralised coordination.

The stronger explanation is structural.

Western and southern European governments are moving from the exceptional spending of the pandemic period towards tighter fiscal management while public infrastructure remains under strain. Sovereign borrowing costs are making debt more expensive, while governments face demands to restore services that have accumulated years of underinvestment.

Young people encounter the result at precisely the point when their expectations about adulthood are being formed.

They face higher education costs, expensive housing, transport charges and public institutions that appear less capable of providing the services previous generations took for granted. Teachers encounter the same squeeze from the other side: more work, tighter employment conditions and persistent shortages.

The alliance between students and public-sector workers is therefore more than a tactical development.

It links two groups with different immediate interests around a shared perception that fiscal consolidation is being paid for through the deterioration of essential public goods.

That is why the Belgian dispute has become larger than the tuition fee itself, and why the French protests cannot be reduced to damaged school buildings.

France’s election makes the conflict harder to contain

The political consequences are particularly sharp in France, where the protests come six months before the presidential election that will replace Emmanuel Macron.

Marine Le Pen has responded by combining support for tougher public-order measures with demands for lower public spending, including calls for violent protesters or their parents to pay for school repairs.

Jean-Luc Mélenchon has taken the opposite position, praising the students and condemning police tactics.

The confrontation gives both sides a ready-made political dividing line. For the hard left, education offers a tangible example of the argument that austerity is a political choice rather than an unavoidable economic law. For the far right, disorder around schools provides an opportunity to connect public spending with demands for stronger authority and accountability.

The centre is left with the most difficult position: accepting that the education system needs money while simultaneously operating under the constraints that make additional spending politically and financially difficult.

An Elabe poll for BFM TV captures the ambiguity. Seventy-two per cent of respondents considered the students’ demands legitimate, while 55 per cent believed the street protests should end.

That split is precisely the territory in which a government can lose control of the political narrative. The public may agree with the grievance while rejecting the method of expressing it.

The French government’s online student consultation attracted more than 43,000 submissions in its first two days. By Thursday morning, 224 high schools were closed, and another 151 were partially open, although 94 per cent were fully or partially operating.

The immediate pressure may therefore ease without the underlying dispute disappearing.

The harder question is what happens when governments across Europe discover that the institutions they are asking citizens to accept less from are the same institutions on which future growth depends. A teacher working two additional hours without extra pay, a family facing a €1,194 tuition bill or a student confronting another rise in living costs does not experience fiscal consolidation as an abstract improvement in public finances.

They experience it as a reduction in the state’s promise.

And once that perception takes hold among students and the public-sector workforce together, the fiscal problem is no longer confined to finance ministries. It becomes a problem of political legitimacy.