Europe's Autumn of Protest: Who Pays the Price

Europe is in the streets this October. High school students in France have blockaded their schools for weeks. Tents have gone up in Lisbon. Spain's housing protests have entered their second month, in Albania's capital, crowds have marched six days running against Prime Minister Edi Rama, and on October 20 and 21, Greece joined in. Reporters have described it as a continent-wide revolt over schools, rents and the cost of living.

That description is accurate, but it leaves out who carries the heaviest load. In each of these countries, the people pressed hardest by crumbling schools, rising rents and tightening budgets are disproportionately Black, African, North African, Roma and migrant. Their neighborhoods were shaped by empire and by decades of housing policy, and they are the first to feel a crisis and the last to be counted in it.

The Suburban Classroom

France's unrest began with teenagers. Since late September, high school students have blockaded schools to protest understaffing, overcrowded classrooms and decaying buildings. By October 15, police had made 1,260 arrests in the Paris region alone, most of them minors. Students have vowed to continue through the autumn school holidays, and unions have called a nationwide day of strikes and marches for Thursday, November 5.

The movement is strongest in the suburbs, the banlieues. At the Le Corbusier high school in Aubervilliers, in Seine-Saint-Denis, students told reporters after nine days of blockade that they would not stop without concrete commitments. Seine-Saint-Denis is the department with the largest immigrant population in mainland France; nearly a third of its residents were born abroad, many in West and North Africa. One Paris student, whose school sits in the comfortable Marais, told the New York Times that suburban classmates had it far worse: "The buildings are falling apart, their teachers are absent all the time, their classes are overcrowded."

France officially forbids collecting statistics by race, so no government figure shows how many of the arrested teenagers are Black or Arab. The absence of data is part of the problem. When the state cannot count who is harmed, it can more easily deny the harm. Readers of our earlier coverage will recognize the pattern from Whose France? and our profile of student leader Seydou Ba.

Lisbon's Edge

On October 17, protesters pitched dozens of tents in Lisbon to demand action on housing and living costs, mirroring the encampments in neighboring Spain. Portugal's housing crisis has a long colonial shadow. After the independence of Cape Verde, Angola, Guinea-Bissau, São Tomé and Príncipe, and Mozambique in the 1970s, African migrants and their descendants settled largely in self-built neighborhoods on the outskirts of Lisbon. Over six decades, housing policy, from demolitions to relocation into public estates, has kept many Afro-Portuguese families on the city's margins.

Cova da Moura, a largely Cape Verdean neighborhood in Amadora, stands as the best-known example. It became a national symbol in 2015, when young men from the neighborhood were beaten at the Alfragide police station; in 2019, eight officers were convicted, though not of racism or torture.

The numbers are hard to find, and that too is telling. Portugal declined to include a question on ethnic origin in its 2021 census, so no official statistic measures housing conditions for Afro-Portuguese residents. For the Roma minority, the figures that do exist are stark: more than one in five Roma in Portugal live in homes lacking at least one basic amenity, against fewer than 5 percent of the general population, and anti-racism researchers report that virtually all Roma families live in households at risk of poverty. As rents climb, families in these neighborhoods face eviction first.

Spain's Locked Doors

Spain's protests center on rents that have outpaced wages, especially in Madrid and Barcelona. As we reported in Spain's Locked Doors, Black, Latin American, North African and Roma Spaniards meet an added barrier: landlords who will not rent to them at all. In a tight market, discrimination becomes easier to practice and harder to prove.

Madrid's classrooms have become a second front. On October 14, 2026, teachers in the region's public schools began a rolling strike that entered its second week on October 20. Their demands include smaller classes (no more than 20 students in primary and 15 in secondary), higher pay, buildings adapted to extreme heat and an end to school segregation. That last demand matters for the same families shut out of the rental market. Madrid's public schools are among the most segregated by income in Europe, and immigrant and working-class children are concentrated in the most crowded classrooms.

Athens Joins the March

On October 20 and 21, thousands of students, teachers, parents and public workers marched in Athens, Thessaloniki and other Greek cities. They demanded more money for public schools, better classrooms, higher pay and relief from rising rents and living costs, and many said they marched in solidarity with the protesters in France, Spain and Italy. Greece's debt crisis a decade ago already taught its young people who pays first when budgets are cut, and migrants and Roma families in Greece's cities sit near the bottom of that line.

Albania's Other Story

Albania's protests concern corruption and Rama's refusal to resign, not race. Yet Albania sits at the center of Europe's migration politics. Under a deal with Italy that survived a court challenge in April 2026, the country hosts Italian-run detention centers for migrants, most from Africa and South Asia. The Council of Europe's anti-racism commission reports that migrants are among the most common targets of racist hate speech in Albania, and that such speech is growing online. Albania's Roma and Egyptian communities, long excluded from schooling, housing and work, drew the attention of a United Nations anti-racism committee in 2024.

The Common Thread

Across these four countries, the pattern repeats. Budget cuts land on the schools, the housing estates and the migrant reception systems that serve people of color most heavily. Governments that refuse to count by race then cannot see, or choose not to see, who is losing. And far-right parties stand ready to blame the very communities that suffer most.

The students of Aubervilliers, the tenants of Amadora and the migrants held in Albania rarely appear in the same headline. They belong in the same story. Watch November 5 in France, and watch who is counted when the marches end.

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