What is profoundly dishonest about the far right's gaze upon a young person in the streets of France? It sees a hood. It hears an accent it does not like. It finds a foreign surname somewhere in the family tree and suddenly imagines it has explained an entire political movement. The American vice-president does it. Donald Trump does it. Greek Health Minister Adonis Georgiadis does it. Different countries, different politicians, same lazy recipe, when young people protest against the conditions of their lives, blame immigrants.
And in doing so they achieve two things at once. They expose their xenophobia and they erase the students. That second part deserves considerably more attention. France's student movement did not begin because somebody woke up one morning and decided that immigration was an exciting new political hobby. It began with students protesting school conditions, teacher shortages, overcrowded classrooms, inadequate facilities and the increasingly frightening prospect of entering adulthood with fewer opportunities and greater insecurity. The movement spread rapidly and developed into something much broader, with tens and then hundreds of thousands taking to the streets.
That is a youth movement. It belongs to them. But the far right cannot resist stealing it.
Suddenly, the discussion is no longer about classrooms, teachers, housing, living costs, inequality, employment or what kind of future today's young people are being handed. Suddenly, the student standing in the street becomes an immigrant. His politics disappear. Her anger disappears. Their demands disappear.
Their ethnicity becomes the story. It is an extraordinarily convenient trick. Trump has explicitly attempted to frame the French unrest as a consequence of mass migration and Islam rather than as a movement centred on schools and the future of French youth. JD Vance has similarly blamed immigration for the violence surrounding the demonstrations. Georgiadis, meanwhile, described the French unrest as the product of a mixture of immigrants from different generations and the far left, portraying the country's turmoil through the same immigration-centred lens.
The political convenience is almost obscene. If students are angry because their schools are failing, governments have to answer questions. If students are angry because they cannot see a secure future, governments have to answer questions. If young people believe public institutions have failed them, politicians have to answer questions.
But if the problem can simply be called "immigration", the questions disappear. Brilliant. The student becomes the immigrant. The grievance becomes the invasion. The protest becomes the riot. The political argument becomes a security problem.
And suddenly nobody has to discuss why an entire generation is angry. Of course, violence must be condemned. Burning buildings, attacking police officers, looting businesses and destroying public property are not somehow transformed into legitimate political expression because the perpetrators are young or angry. The violence that erupted in parts of France was real, serious and destructive, and those responsible should face the consequences of their actions. Hundreds of thousands, however, marched peacefully, while the government's own figures and reporting from the demonstrations distinguish the enormous peaceful mobilisation from the violent fringe.
That distinction is precisely what political opportunists do not want. Because once you separate the rioter from the student, you have to listen to the student. And that is much more uncomfortable. The young people marching are not props in somebody else's immigration debate. They are not disposable extras in a culture-war campaign manufactured by politicians thousands of kilometres away. They are citizens. They are the people who will inherit the consequences of today's political decisions long after today's ministers have retired, today's presidents have left office and today's social-media warriors have found another country to lecture.
They are asking a brutally simple question: What kind of country are you leaving us? And the answer from the far right seems to be: Stop complaining. Blame your neighbour.
It is intellectually pathetic. It also reveals something darker. The far right increasingly treats second-generation immigrants as permanently foreign. Born in France? Still an immigrant. Raised in France? Still an immigrant. French citizen? Still somehow an outsider. Protest against the government? Evidence of failed integration. Protest alongside others? Proof of an immigrant conspiracy.
At what point does a person finally become French? Apparently, never. This is the poison hidden inside the rhetoric. Second-generation immigrants are simultaneously told that they must integrate and then informed, whenever convenient, that they will never quite belong. Their Frenchness is conditional. Their citizenship is questioned culturally even when it is unquestionable legally.
And then politicians wonder why alienation grows. The students of France deserve better than this intellectual fraud. They deserve to have their arguments heard, even when those arguments are uncomfortable. They deserve classrooms that work, teachers who are there, institutions that listen and a future that does not feel like a punishment for being born at the wrong economic moment.
Most importantly, they deserve to own their movement. Not Trump. Not Vance. Not Georgiadis. Not Le Pen. Not Macron. Not the far left either. The students. Because the easiest way to defeat a young generation is not necessarily to silence it. Sometimes it is simply to convince everybody that nobody should listen to what it is saying.
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