Will ‘youthquake’ reach our shores?
In what has been described by former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown in The Guardian, a “global youthquake is happening” all over the world. Brown is referring to widespread protests led by students in various countries in Europe, Asia, South America, Africa, and Australia. The student-led protests raise varied issues, but a common underlying reason for their complaints is the rising cost of living.
In recent weeks, the protests have been dramatic, turning violent in some instances, in several European countries. In France, for instance, young high school students in a Paris suburb started protesting last September, complaining about poor school conditions such as the shortage of teachers, congested classrooms, and dilapidated buildings. The protests continued last month, spreading to more than 1,000 high school campuses all over France. The demonstrations were joined by teachers, parents, university students, and activists, broadening the list of grievances to include economic, political, and social dissatisfaction.
Brown warns that “the world is experiencing the biggest outbreak of student demonstrations for 60 years” because the “[p]romises we made young people have been broken—and they know it.”
In Germany, student protests started early this year because of government plans to bring back compulsory military service. Last October, students demonstrated in 34 German cities under the banners ”Gen Z regelt” (Gen Z takes charge) and ”Gen Z steht auf” (Gen Z stands up). The student movement demands more public investment in schools, support for people with addiction problems, and funding for psychotherapy. They’ve also raised issues of affordable housing, a lower cost of living, stronger action on climate change, and social security.
In Italy, thousands of students and workers took to the streets last Oct. 30, protesting the prohibitive cost of living and high military spending. Students have also taken to the streets in Belgium, Ireland, Spain, Greece, Serbia, and Albania to protest inadequate funding for education, prohibitive housing costs, high cost of living, among others.
The student demonstrations in Europe are reportedly often organized impromptu via TikTok or Instagram, with Belgium’s interior minister complaining about what he calls the “TikTokisation” of protests.
British Broadcasting Corp. editor Katya Adler writes that “There’s a continent-wide sense of economic malaise felt by large numbers of young people—and it goes far beyond education. They worry about the environment and fret that artificial intelligence will rob them of job opportunities. They fear the spiraling cost of living could prevent them from finishing their education and stop them buying or renting a home big enough to start a family.”
In India, Gen Z student-led protests, popularly known as the “Cockroach Movement,” have spread across India. Their complaints include exam corruption, high youth unemployment, and anomalies in voter list revisions. In Indonesia, students in various cities have been holding protests against massive forest fires caused by corporate greed, which have resulted in very serious air pollution even in neighboring countries such as Malaysia, Singapore, and the Philippines.
The student protesters all over the world must be looking up to the student movement in Serbia as a role model because, after two years of active protest and after transforming their groups into a political movement, they went on to topple their authoritarian government by having their candidates capture a majority of seats in parliament.
The issues that students in Europe and Asia are protesting against are problems that similarly beset our country, and at far more serious levels. The underfunding of our educational system is chronic and severe. Not only do we have 51,000 classrooms already at risk of being condemned but we also have a deficiency of 165,000 classrooms. We have a shortage of up to 30,000 teachers, and over 5.1 million of our students are classified as “aisle learners” because they lack proper desks or rooms. All of these are due to the wrong priorities of our lawmakers.
Because of high inflation and low wages, the cost of living for millions of Filipino families is prohibitively high. While our overall poverty rate has gone down, more than 11 million (9.7 percent) of our people still live below the poverty line, and around 28 percent of our citizens live just above the poverty line.
There are up to 4.5 million Filipinos who live in squatter areas, and millions of our countrymen cannot afford to buy a house. Metro Manila is considered one of the least affordable housing markets in the world, relative to local incomes.
To top it all, the level of corruption among Philippine politicians has shocked and angered the whole country recently. As much as P1 trillion is estimated to have been lost to corruption because of ”ghost” flood control and climate mitigation projects since 2023.
With all these societal problems that beset our country, will a youthquake reach Philippine shores? We so desperately need it to reach our shores, and hopefully it will stay all the way up to the 2028 elections.
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