Over the weekend, a student-led movement in Serbia toppled far-right Serbian president Aleksandar Vučić, who had spent more than a decade in power. Within hours of Vučić conceding defeat, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva won a fourth term against Flávio Bolsonaro in Brazil.
After a decade globally where society and technology have been veering toward disconnection and insularity, a sense of scarcity and a poverty of possibility, this was a move at long last toward a politics of collective hope.
Supporters of Serbia’s Student List party celebrate the party’s victory in the parliamentary elections in the city centre of Novi Sad on 26 October. Photo: Maxim Konankov / NurPhoto / Getty
These were the first tangible wins, too, of a cresting wave of gen-Z mobilisation. In the past month, young people have been filling the streets, and our headlines and feeds, with calls for change across the world, from Spain to Argentina, in Albania, Belgium, Morocco, India, Serbia, Brazil, Italy, Chile, Greece, Portugal, France.
The list is too long to be a coincidence, too diverse to suggest a single, localised cause: rather, it points to fractures in a broken system becoming visible and unbearable across the world.
In Serbia, the protests kicked off two years ago when a concrete canopy collapsed in a train station and killed 16 people. But that was just the spark. While the students led the movement, they built a coalition across trade unions, professional organisations, farmers. Their candidates, who took the majority of the votes in this weekend’s election, included a cardiologist and a basketball player, economists and artists and farmers.
Lula supporters aboard a Sao Paulo subway train celebrate his victory in the country’s general election on 25 October. Photo: Luca Meola/Getty
Their platform: a more liveable country for all. Anti-corruption, affordable housing, free textbooks, a doctor in every village, and investing in building the economy “so young people can stay here and build their futures alongside their families”.
In Spain, protests were sparked in September when an 87-year-old was evicted after living in the same home for more than 70 years because her rent went up 230%. In Argentina, where spending on universities fell by 41% this year, students are protesting against education cuts. In France, high school students, joined by farmers and trade unions and public sector employees, are demanding investment in education.
Across the board, the cost of living is too high (up between 59% and 78% since 2000 in much of western Europe, according to al-Jazeera research) and the future is too far out of reach. Young people want schools. They want universities. To be able to afford a home. To have a possibility of a future, in a world where headlines suggest AI will replace labour and the planet is heating too fast to be a liveable home for us into the future.
The rent is too high, the schools aren’t good enough, there aren’t enough jobs. This is true in a way we’re apt to forget when scrolling alone on our phones
Only 32% of people around the world think the next generation will be better off, research suggests. Is it any surprise that the generation inheriting this impossible world is taking to the streets?
I’ve spent the last decade researching, reporting, and building at the intersection of these worlds, including with my first book, Girlhood, which collected diary entries about growing up from 30 teenage girls in 27 countries, and leading Freeda, a publisher that reached hundreds of millions of young women around the world. My work has been about trying to understand how the design of our technologies and societies has been enabling a sense of disconnection, insularity and scarcity, and how we can reimagine them in order to bring young people together in the direction of possibility.
This is a generation who have come of age in a world where both technology and political narratives have sown division and disconnection, calcified echo chambers and enabled othering. The rise of far-right, nationalist politics around the world coincided with social media becoming the primary location for connection. But it has only driven us further apart politically, as each of us scroll alone on our phones with our individualised, personalised feeds, designed to show us a different version of reality, with more of what outrages us and engages us. This has had people pointing the finger at each other while they face many of the same underlying struggles.
What is remarkable to me about these protests is that they are a reminder, as protests always have been, about how intertwined our fates and fortunes are, and of our collective power. In some countries, students have been joined by the likes of farmers and trade unions.
The rent is too high, the schools aren’t good enough, there aren’t enough jobs. This is true whatever your race or gender or religion. This is true in a way we’re apt to forget when scrolling alone on our phones.
Student movements have always been the spark that lit fires of change across the world. The hope in these movements is that they are shifting the conversation from one rooted in divisive politics to one of liveability politics for all. Gen Z are moving away from echo chambers and differing versions of reality in their feeds to discover that, on the streets, the world they’re all trying to make liveable is the same – and that together, their voices can come together in a deafening chorus.
Masuma Ahuja is a journalist and strategist. She is the author of The Infrastructure of Belonging, published by Full Set this month