A Generation Heard Through the Haze of Tear Gas

The images that travelled furthest this week were not of the Duomo in sunlight but of soldiers patrolling Milan and shopkeepers boarding up their windows. Euronews reported that additional troops were deployed and stores shuttered a week after looting and clashes. France 24 described drones and helicopters monitoring marches in eight cities. The world's wires told a story of a country bracing itself, and in doing so they framed Italy's unrest as a security problem before it was understood as a political one.

Yet the same coverage, read closely, refuses that reduction. The New York Times reported that young demonstrators were 'fed up with the political establishment and rising cost of living' and hoped to make their message heard after violence had overshadowed the previous weekend. Euronews noted that protests over wages, the cost of living and public services spread across Italy. The Guardian's Rome correspondent wrote of a debate over Italy's 'lost generation', exposing a divide between marginalised and immigrant youth and those with greater prospects. The wire, in other words, carried two stories at once: the story of public order, and the story of a generation that does not expect its future to be better than its present.

We take the second story seriously. The first is a matter for the authorities, and the deployment of security forces is not in itself a scandal; a state that cannot keep its streets open cannot claim to govern. But a state that can think only about its streets has stopped listening. The Guardian's editorial on Europe's protests made the argument plainly: the social contract has broken, and young people want solutions. That judgment was written about the continent, but it landed in Italy with particular force.

The comparison with France is instructive and was drawn by several outlets. The Guardian's live coverage noted that French police made a thousand arrests while Italian officers raided homes in Milan. France 24 reported that the spark in France was deteriorating conditions in high schools and universities, particularly for students from underprivileged backgrounds, and that wages were not keeping up with inflation. The Guardian's editorial observed that 'France sneezed, and Europe has again caught the cold.' Italy, in this reading, is not an exception but a variant: the same pressure, expressed through a different political culture and a different labour market.

What the foreign coverage adds is context that domestic debate often flattens. France 24 interviewed the sociologist Gökçe Tuncel, who argued that the youth-led protests in Albania, Italy, France and India reveal more than a succession of local grievances; they signal something like a generational demand for fairness, expressed in materialist terms. That is a more demanding interpretation than the one that sees only rioters or only victims. It asks whether a country whose young people work on short contracts, pay rents that consume their wages and expect little from the pension system can credibly tell them to wait.

The week also produced a reminder that anger is not the property of the young. France 24 reported that Italian truck drivers blocked refineries and key roads over soaring diesel prices, and that the government warned of criminal penalties before the protests ended on Friday after fuel aid, according to The Local Italy. The sequence is telling: a material grievance, a disruption, a concession. It is the grammar of interest-group politics, and it works. The question the week poses is why the grammar should be denied to those who have no union, no lobby and no refinery to block.

We should be careful, however, about the stories the world tells about Italy's anger. The Guardian reported that pro-Trump Maga media in the United States were in a 'froth' over the European protests, hoping that unrest abroad would make people vote Republican. Another Guardian commentator, Alberto Alemanno, warned against painting a 'violent and coordinated youth uprising' — a picture, he argued, that Europe's enemies want to paint. Each country's protesters, he insisted, have distinct grievances and should be listened to. We share that caution. The temptation to narrate Italy's troubles as a morality play for foreign audiences is strong, and it serves no one.

There is also a European dimension that the week made explicit. The Local Italy reported that European lawmakers demanded an urgent EU investigation into the role of social media during protests in member states, adding that Brussels should be prepared to block access 'as a last resort'. That is a serious proposal and deserves serious scrutiny. But it risks repeating the error of treating symptoms as causes. If the young are angry about wages, housing and public services, the platform on which they organise is not the root of the problem. It is the instrument through which a real problem becomes visible.

The Guardian's editorial noted that an electoral supercycle over the next year may redefine the continent's future, but that what happens on the streets is shaping it too. Italy is part of that cycle. The Guardian also published a commentary by Riccardo Alcaro arguing that Giorgia Meloni is Italy's great political survivor, and asking whether Roberto Vannacci's new far-right movement could fatally outflank her with elections looming in 2027. We do not endorse that analysis, but we note what it implies: the pressure from the streets will be met by a political system already looking over its shoulder. The risk is that the response to youth anger becomes a contest over who can sound toughest, rather than who can offer a credible future.

This newspaper's premise is that Italy is best understood as the world sees it. This week the world saw a country where the young have taken to the streets and the state has answered with drones, soldiers and boarded-up shops. That is a partial picture, but it is not a false one. The deeper story the foreign coverage kept returning to is the one the Guardian named: a broken social contract. Italy's public debt, its ageing population, its slow growth and its regional divides are not abstractions; they are the conditions under which a generation decides whether to stay, to protest or to leave.

The truckers ended their blockade when fuel aid arrived. The students and young workers who marched in Rome and Milan have received no such settlement. We do not suggest that every demand can be met, or that the budget is infinitely elastic. We suggest only that a country which asks its young to accept austerity, precarity and delay must be able to explain what it is offering in return. That explanation has not yet been made. Until it is, the world will keep reporting Italy through the haze of tear gas, and the young will keep returning to the streets.