Youth Is Our Future

Youth is our future, everyone says. Which youth? The one in the paddle boat or the one in the Rolls-Royce?

I. A Sentence for Sunday Speeches

No sentence is so undisputed and so inconsequential. It appears in party manifestos, in graduation addresses, in budget speeches. And while it is being spoken, the town hall of Limoges is burning.

On 17 October 2026, depending on who was counting, between 550,000 and 800,000 people took to the streets in France. It had begun five weeks earlier at a secondary school in Créteil near Paris: missing teachers, overcrowded classes, mould on the walls, classrooms that reach forty degrees in summer. In the end a 143-year-old town hall burned, the town halls of Marseille and Lille were stormed, and shops were looted in nine cities. Since September, thousands have been taken into police custody in France; almost nine in ten were minors.

On the same day there were street battles in Milan and Bologna, tear gas in Brussels, tens of thousands marching in Lisbon. In Madrid the teachers are on indefinite strike; in Athens students are camping in front of parliament. Anyone who thinks this is a French or a European problem is not looking far enough.

II. The Wave

The wave did not start in Europe. In 2022 a movement of young people in Sri Lanka brought down the ruling presidential family. In 2024 students in Bangladesh drove the prime minister out of the country, and in Kenya a generation organising itself through social media forced the president to withdraw a tax law. 2025 became the year of Generation Z. In Nepal the government banned social media in September; the young took to the streets, the government palace burned, and after two days the prime minister resigned. In Madagascar first the water and electricity failed, then the government. In Morocco young people protested under the name “GenZ 212” against money flowing into football stadiums while eight women died in childbirth in a hospital in Agadir. “The stadiums are here, but where are the hospitals?” read their placards. In Indonesia, Peru, the Philippines, Bulgaria and Serbia they took to the streets against corruption and self-enrichment. In 2026 India’s education minister resigned after exam scandals drove the young onto the streets.

Over all these protests flies a strange emblem: a pirate flag from a Japanese comic, a grinning skull in a straw hat. It has hung on government buildings in Jakarta, Kathmandu, Antananarivo and Sofia. One need not know the comic to understand the message. It is the flag of those who see themselves outside the order, because the order has made no room for them.

The International Labour Organization counts 257 million young people worldwide who are neither working nor learning. That is one in five young people on earth, and more than the combined populations of Germany, France and Italy. In China almost one in five young people in the cities is without work, more than ever since the new method of counting began.

III. Which Youth?

But there is not one youth. There are at least four.

The first is the majority. In Madagascar or Kenya half the population is younger than twenty, in Nepal and Bangladesh younger than thirty. There the young are not a fringe group; they are the people. When they take to the streets, governments fall.

The second is the minority. In Europe, in Japan, in China, societies are ageing. In Germany more than half of all eligible voters are over fifty. Here the young are too few to decide and too many to overlook. They cannot bring down governments, but they can set town halls on fire. Or they can fall silent.

That is the third youth: the one that withdraws. In China it has a name, “lying flat”: not fighting, not wanting to rise, doing the bare minimum because the extra effort does not pay. This youth does not demonstrate. It refuses. For a state it is more convenient than the youth on the streets. For a society it is more dangerous, because it no longer expects anything.

The first three share an experience their parents did not have. A degree no longer guarantees a job, a job no longer guarantees a flat, a flat no longer guarantees a family. In Spain an average rent costs almost the entire income of a young person, and only one in seven under thirty no longer lives with their parents. Whoever is still sleeping in their childhood bedroom at thirty has not had their future taken away. They were never given it.

IV. The New Jeunesse Dorée

And then there is a fourth youth. It does not demonstrate, it does not withdraw, and it does not sleep in its childhood bedroom. It posts.

The term comes, like so much in this story, from France. After the fall of Robespierre in 1794, the well-dressed sons of the bourgeoisie roamed Paris with clubs and beat up Jacobins and sans-culottes, tolerated and encouraged by the new rulers. They were called the jeunesse dorée, the gilded youth. It was the youth that defended the order against the other youth.

Today it no longer needs clubs. In Nepal in the summer of 2025 the children of politicians showed off their luxury travel, designer bags and sports cars on TikTok, while their peers emigrate by the hundreds of thousands as labourers to the Gulf states to feed their families. The young called them “Nepo Kids”, and one of the most-viewed posts asked simply: where does the money come from? When the government blocked social media a few weeks later, the country went up in flames. In the Philippines the daughter of a construction family showed off more than forty luxury cars, among them a Rolls-Royce she had reportedly bought because of the umbrella that came with it. The money came from state contracts for flood protection, much of which was never built. At the same time a teacher was paddling a boat through the floodwater to get to school.

This is more than envy. The jeunesse dorée makes visible what the statistics conceal: the future is not scarce; it has been allocated. In 2023 the Swiss bank UBS reported for the first time that new billionaires had acquired more of their wealth through inheritance than through building their own businesses. Over the next twenty years more than a thousand billionaires will pass more than five trillion dollars to their children. In Germany large family fortunes are inherited largely tax-free; we described this in “We Will Keep Inheriting” and “Rents, Sinecures and the Highwaymen”.

That changes the question. The conflict runs not only between old and young but straight through the young. Grandparents with means pay for university; parents provide the deposit for the flat. What the state takes from the young, wealthy families make good privately. The others cannot. So injustice between generations becomes injustice between families, and the failure of some appears as personal failure rather than as the result of a mechanism. On one side stand those to whom the future is bequeathed, on the other those to whom it is sold, at rents they cannot pay. Talk of “the youth” conceals this. It pretends that everyone is in the same boat. Some are sitting in a Rolls-Royce, the others in a paddle boat.

V. What Is Protected and What Is Not

States say they have no money. That is only half true. Over decades they have made themselves incapable of action through debt, because every government felt compelled to rescue “systemic” banks, later to pay for the pandemic and the energy crisis on credit, and preferred to win the next election rather than the next generation. Germany even coined a word for it in 2022: the “Doppel-Wumms”, the “double whammy”, a 200-billion-euro framework against the energy crisis. It made consumption cheaper, of all things of what was scarce, and built nothing that lasts. In “Doppel-Wumms” we called it a gift of the old to themselves, paid for by the young, who were not asked. The word that nobody utters at such moments is renunciation.

But the money that is still there is not distributed at random.

France spends more than half of everything it produces through public budgets. The draft budget for 2027 freezes all spending with two exceptions: interest and defence. Protected are the creditors and the military. Frozen are the schools. France now pays higher interest on its debt than Italy and Greece. Every euro that goes to the creditors is missing in the classroom in Créteil.

And who are the creditors? Behind the government bonds stand banks, insurers and funds, and behind these stand above all older people with assets. The state thus pays the old twice: once through pensions and care, a second time through the interest on their savings. Both are paid from taxes on work, and those who work are mainly the young. We described this double movement in June in “The Structural Redistribution Between Generations”. Nobody planned it, nobody is cheating, and precisely for that reason it holds so firmly. The most important party is not at the table, because it cannot yet vote or has not yet been born; that is the game we described in “The Phantom Player”.

In Morocco it was no different, only more visible: stadiums for the 2030 World Cup and hospitals in which women die in childbirth. And Germany? In 2025 it relaxed its debt brake for arms spending. Under the federal financial plan the defence budget will more than double by 2030, while the budget that covers education, family and youth falls, not only relatively but in absolute terms. By 2030 the military is to receive thirteen times as much as that budget. At the same time the Chancellery in Berlin is being almost doubled in size, for nearly 800 million euros. We described this in July in “The State That Builds on Itself”. To be fair: in Germany schools are paid for mainly by the Länder, and a changed security situation demands a response. But the one does not force the other. It is a choice, and it is a choice against the future. The journalist Frank Sieren has named the rule behind it: declining societies are above all busy not losing what they have achieved. Rising ones invest in what is to come.

Savings are made where resistance seems weakest. The pension reform of 2023 paralysed France for weeks; since then pensions have been touched only with great caution. Pensioners vote. Pupils do not. This is not a conspiracy but arithmetic. A government that wants to survive places the burdens on those least able to defend themselves. Until they do.

Not everything fails for lack of money. In September Spain’s government put forward emergency decrees against evictions that would have cost the state almost nothing. Parliament rejected them. Shortly afterwards an 87-year-old woman died in Madrid who had been evicted from her flat after more than seventy years. There it is not the treasury that is incapable of action, but the majority. And in Lisbon a minister declared that the government would “not yield to shouts from the street”. Whoever speaks like that has already decided that he need not listen.

VI. The Cheapest Remedy

A state that can no longer counter the causes still has one remedy: the police. In the short term it is cheaper than schools, hospitals or flats, and it makes the government look determined. That is the perfect method for escalation.

In France a 15-year-old lost a hand to a grenade, a 16-year-old the sight of one eye to a rubber bullet. In Morocco more than 2,400 people were charged, minors among them, and three demonstrators were killed. In Tanzania, in Iran, in Nepal the state’s response ended with many dead.

One has to be fair: the violence on the other side is real too. Schools were set on fire, police officers injured, shops looted, and everywhere there are groups who want exactly that. A government that looks on idly betrays its mandate. But whoever answers a legitimate cause above all with harshness confirms the suspicion that he has nothing else left to offer. In France 62 per cent consider the movement justified.

France itself has shown that there is another way. When the yellow vests shook the country in 2018, Macron found eight to ten billion euros within a few weeks for the minimum wage, small pensions and overtime, suspended the fuel tax and launched a great national debate. The movement ebbed away. Today he no longer has that way out. The markets are watching, interest rates are rising. What was a safety valve in 2018 is closed in 2026. Morocco, by contrast, gave in in 2025 and raised its spending on health and education. So it can be done, if one is willing and able.

VII. Which Future?

And what happens when the young win? The record is sobering.

In Madagascar Generation Z brought down the president in October 2025. The military took power. In April 2026 it had activists arrested who asked for an election date. In Bangladesh the students drove the prime minister out of the country in 2024. In the election of February 2026 their own party won three per cent of the vote; one of the old parties won. The young pushed open the gate, and others walked through it.

Nepal is the exception. There, in March 2026, a party led by a 35-year-old former mayor won two thirds of the seats. Whether he delivers what the street expects of him remains open.

A hard lesson follows. A protest without form, without organisation, without a programme can bring down a government, but it cannot form one. Power then falls to those who are organised: the army, the old parties, the apparatus. In “Whose Servants?” we asked whom this apparatus serves when the master changes. In Madagascar the answer has already been given.

History knows the pattern. In 1789 a bankrupt king summoned the Estates-General because he needed money, and got a revolution at whose end a general became emperor. In Germany from 1930 to 1932 a chancellor cut spending in the deepest crisis and governed by emergency decree; the young ran to those who promised them a future, no matter which. There is no automatism, and today’s Europe is richer and more stable than the Europe of those days. But whoever wants to be sure that it will turn out differently this time should know the pattern.

VIII. And Germany?

In Germany it is quiet. In Berlin and Hamburg some 150 pupils each blockaded their schools, with a banner reading “Solidarity with the pupils in France”. For 31 October a call for nationwide pupil protests is circulating, on a Saturday. Berlin’s education senator replied: “School is not a lawless space.”

The quiet is deceptive. Here too schools are crumbling, here too young people cannot find flats in the cities, here too teachers are missing. The difference lies not in the causes but in temperament. French anger goes onto the streets. German anger goes into the polling booth. In France a town hall burns; in Saxony-Anhalt a party that the domestic intelligence service classifies as confirmed right-wing extremist stands on the threshold of government; we described this in “The Friendly Face”. The German way looks quieter. In the end it could change more. The only question is: in which direction?

Young voters give not one answer but two opposite ones. In the 2025 federal election, 18- to 24-year-olds voted most often for the Left Party and next for the AfD, young women tending left, young men tending right. In eastern Germany the AfD is often the strongest party among the young. The centre that has governed the country for seventy years is losing its youth to the fringes.

How far this pull reaches into the centre itself can be seen in the Junge Union, the youth organisation of the Christian Democrats. It is the largest political youth organisation in the country and was long the most reliable training ground for power. When Friedrich Merz became CDU leader at his third attempt in 2021, it was his fan club. He promised a more conservative, more business-friendly party, exactly what the young wanted after sixteen years of Merkel. Today he is on probation with them. At the end of 2025 young Christian Democrat MPs almost brought down their own government’s pension package because, by their reckoning, it shifts the burden onto their generation. That was new: for the first time the youth of a governing party openly fought its own government over the distribution between generations. At the Deutschlandtag in Bonn on 17 October 2026 the JU’s chairman Johannes Winkel spoke of the “resignation” that had spread in the party. One delegate asked the chancellor whether he would not drive to the Federal President and ask to be dismissed. Merz promised to implement the pension reform “as it lies on the table”, including the end of retirement at 63. The applause was brief and subdued; the delegates clapped loudest when he spoke against the AfD and the Left. Winkel tied their allegiance to a condition: “If we manage to implement decisions together, then you will have us at your side.” Admiration has become a deal: reform in exchange for loyalty.

That is one way: the youth that organises and fights for its share within the order. It is the opposite of protest without form, and it is the best a democracy can expect of its young. But one has to look at whom the bill is presented to. It is addressed above all to the pensioners. Of the large inheritances there is little talk.

The other way showed itself a month earlier. A week after the election in Saxony-Anhalt, the then treasurer of the Junge Union, Clara von Nathusius, thirty years old, called the firewall against the AfD a “failed project” on television. One should talk to everyone, including the AfD, she said, and with Merz the Union could no longer win an election. She expressly spoke only for herself, but she had gained a large following online in a short time. Before the Deutschlandtag she declined to stand again, according to press reports under pressure from within her own organisation.

Both are happening in the same organisation, in the same autumn. One direction wants to reform the order; the other is prepared to shift its boundaries. Nobody knows exactly how strong each is. Which prevails will decide more about Germany’s future than any pupils’ demonstration. In France the direction is decided on the streets. In Germany it is decided in the parties, more quietly, but with no fewer consequences.

IX. What the Sentence Demands

“Youth is our future” is not a compliment. It is an obligation. Whoever means the sentence seriously must say what he is leaving to the young: schools where one can learn, flats one can afford, work one can live on, and a state that does not send the police first.

What needs to be done is not complicated, only uncomfortable. The burdens must also be borne where the voters sit and where the fortunes lie. Whoever freezes schools today in order to pay interest will pay tomorrow for police, prisons and burnt town halls, and the day after for the consequences of an election.

In “Those Who Cannot Provide Security Cannot Demand Obedience” we described what happens when the silent contract between rulers and ruled breaks. It does not break in a day. It breaks on a generation that realises it does not appear in the contract at all. A society that drives its youth onto the streets and then has them shot at with rubber bullets does not have a security problem. It has sold its future and is surprised that the buyers want to collect it.