France’s youth are outnumbered. Their protests are testing who gets heard

High schoolers who have protested for weeks in France about underfunded schools and uncertain futures complain that it’s a frustrating struggle to make themselves heard.

Demographically, it is true that young people in aging societies — which include France but also the United States and others — no longer have the same weight of numbers that helped their parents and grandparents make their mark when they were young.

In France, protesting pupils have managed to spark a national conversation about funding for schools that has morphed into broader unrest over cost-of-living struggles and heavy-handed policing.

In Serbia, two years of student-led protests unseated the Balkan country’s populist strongman, Aleksandar Vucic, this weekend. In Albania, high schoolers and university students are swelling the ranks of an anti-government movement that for months has pressured Prime Minister Edi Rama to resign. Gen Z is also mobilizing in India, Nepal and