A global youthquake is happening. Promises we made young people have been broken – and they know it | Gordon Brown

Anger and protest have put liberal democracy on trial. It’s vital to understand the rage that now unites a generation

We have not yet reached a 1968 moment, when students at the Sorbonne lit a fuse that detonated a crisis that eventually brought down the De Gaulle government. But in late 2026, starting with the symbolic act of young French people climbing the July Column at Paris’s Place de la Bastille, the world is experiencing the biggest outbreak of student demonstrations for 60 years.

When Italian students subsequently occupied a high school in Rome, they opened their demand for change with the words “like in France”. Youth demonstrations are now raging from India – where the government has responded with repressive force to the Cockroach movement – to Albania, where, after being out on the streets for nearly five months, students are demanding not only an end to corruption, but the replacement of the government.

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