Activists say struggle must go on until their ‘maximum’ demands are met over teacher shortages and building repairs
French children should continue to barricade their schools and take part in street protests, a student union said on Monday after the government announced a package of education measures to try to stem the crisis.
“Today we’re at the negotiating table, we’re able to negotiate with the government,” Pierre Sourzat of Les Lycéens told France Info television. “We’re in a power struggle and we still need to call for continued mobilisation to meet a maximum of our demands.”
After freedom, we want to give our people something radical: a normal, functioning state
Two years ago, I harboured no political ambition whatsoever. I was a student at the faculty of technical sciences in Novi Sad, my home town, pursuing a PhD in human resources and simply living my life. That was until the canopy collapse at the newly renovated train station in Novi Sad in November 2024, which killed 16 people. I took part in street protests and rallies in response to this shocking event, and like many others, realised that it needed to be a turning point.
This was not an unavoidable tragedy. Systemic corruption and a culture of entrenched impunity were obvious factors in the collapse. But instead of ordering a full and impartial investigation and coming clean on official failings, the authorities began pushing back against us for demanding justice. We were vilified and attacked in the streets but law enforcement did nothing. So we took refuge in our lecture halls and schools, barricading ourselves inside faculty buildings, ready for a long haul.
Novak Simin is a member of Serbia’s Student List movement
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Two years after the Novi Sad tragedy gave birth to a youthful political movement, Sunday’s remarkable election has taken the country into a new era
This weekend it will be two years since the collapse of a shoddily constructed train station canopy in Serbia’s second city, Novi Sad. The tragedy, killing 16 people, was swiftly attributed to state corruption and failures of regulation, sparking student-led protests across the country.
Some of those demonstrators dared to imagine that they could become the catalyst for a democratic revolution.
Clarification comes after PM fuelled speculation about EU-UK relationship in series of interviews at weekend
Downing Street has been forced to clarify Andy Burnham’s stance on whether the UK would return to having freedom of movement with the EU after the prime minister said an “honest discussion” was needed on the issue.
Burnham fuelled speculation about a return to freedom of movement in an interview at the weekend, prompting questions about how close the UK could become to Brussels.
Andy Burnham claims revising Brexit would ‘bring people together’. The PM wants to look again at issues like free movement, but rules out joining the euro or Schengen. Would rejoining the EU bring up old wounds and risk further division?
Plus, as chancellor John Healey gears up for a tricky budget, what should you be looking out for?
Readers respond to Polly Toynbee’s article on the possibility of rejoining the EU
With all due respect to Polly Toynbee, why do we assume that we would need another referendum to return to Europe (Shall we have another EU referendum? Maybe – but not yet, 19 October)? The last one didn’t work out too well. Asking the electorate to vote a simple yes or no on such a complex and multifaceted deal was never going to be the right approach; nor will it be to go back in.
Call it what you will – Brejoin, Bre-entry, Brehabilitation – it shouldn’t be an all-or-nothing deal. The one thing that Brexit has given us is the opportunity to cherrypick the elements of a relationship that are of mutual benefit to both parties. How about approaching it on a piecemeal basis, processing it through normal parliamentary procedure? No buses required.
Gary Jones Wimbledon, London
Amid widespread protests, Muriel E Cockcroft has sympathy for French youth but fears how much steam will be let out at the next convulsion
I’m writing in response to your editorial (The Guardian view on France’s protests: a polarised country is in a perilous political moment, 19 October). While the focus is on Emmanuel Macron, let us not forget the hierarchical structure of French administration, from mayors to MPs to senators to prefects and heads of region. All are part of the government, but few stood up to bring leaky school roofs and missing teachers to national consciousness. I deplore the senseless destruction of shops and state buildings. But I also deplore the fact that students had to protest to be heard. In the many administrative tiers of this highly hierarchical country, no one acted and inertia prevailed.
Centrally, the government is financially challenged but refuses to acknowledge that having a huge deficit, an ageing population and a low retirement age are perhaps connected. Modest attempts to increase the retirement age also provoked violent protests. Financial tools for individual retirement remain complex and restricted. Thus, this sclerotic system presses on until the next crisis.
Non-hierarchical movement is seeking to ‘rebuild society’ in Balkan country after years of authoritarian rule
Serbia’s triumphant but untested Student List movement is preparing to start talks on forming a government capable of reversing 14 years of increasingly authoritarian nationalist rule, after a seismic weekend election win.
Supporters of the movement, which has no experience of government, took to the streets in the west Balkan country on Monday after the strongman former president, Aleksandar Vučić, was defeated in a historic landslide.
Andy Burnham claims revising Brexit would ‘bring people together’. The PM wants to look again at issues such as free movement but rules out joining the euro or Schengen. Would rejoining the EU open old wounds and risk further division? Plus, as the chancellor, John Healey, gears up for a tricky budget, what should you be looking out for?
You can watch this episode of Politics Weekly on our YouTube channel here.
Read Jessica Elgot’s deep dive on how Andy Burnham and John Healey have been preparing for the budget here.
Gernot Döllner criticised for in-person announcement of major investment in US days before midterm elections
The head of the luxury carmaker Audi is under fire in Germany for appearing at a rally with Donald Trump just days before the US midterm elections, to announce billions of dollars of investment in battleground state Georgia.
Gernot Döllner joined Trump on stage after the US president gave a speech criticised by the head of an elected body of employees at Audi’s parent company, Volkswagen, as being full of “racism, sexism, transphobia [and] contempt for democracy”.
Citizens want greater democracy, while tourists seek out Soviet-era nostalgia, but could Russia’s war on Ukraine be the ultimate decider of country’s fate?
In the heart of Tbilisi’s Armenian quarter, Avlabari Square is where crowds gather for the “Saturday March”. Every weekend, protesters head towards the Bridge of Love, reach Freedom Square and march towards parliament, chanting slogans against Irakli Kobakhidze’s government.
Demonstrators in Tblisi take part in the Saturday March, when pro-European parties and movements march through the historic centre to protest against the policies of the ruling Georgian Dream party, which critics accuse of being pro-Russian.
Huge crowds gathered in Slavija Square in Belgrade to celebrate after Serbia's long-serving leader, Aleksandar Vučić, conceded defeat in an election. Late on Sunday night, people thronged the streets after a two-year student-led opposition movement ousted Vučić's rightwing government
Jump fuelled by fears of further Middle East supply disruptions amid reports of US-Israeli plans to strike Iran
European gas prices have jumped to levels not seen since 2022 as fears continue to grow around the continent’s supply this winter and the conflict in the Middle East.
Wholesale gas prices hit €97 (£81) a megawatt-hour on Monday, as temperatures across Europe fell and traders priced in stronger demand for heating.
The prime minister previously said that he wanted a debate on how Britain can establish a closer relationship
Speaking at his rough sleeping summit in Downing Street this morning, Andy Burnham expanded on the claim he made on Good Morning Britain about tackling rough sleeping being cheaper than ignoring the problem. (See 11.13am.)
He said:
We’ve also got to be conscious when we speak to the rest of the country, the taxpayers of this country, that actually to leave people sleeping rough has financial consequences. It doesn’t work for anybody and it doesn’t work for the public purse, because if you leave people in a position where they are in and out of A&E, and in and out of a hospital bed, that doesn’t make sense for anybody.
There is a rock-solid business case to do something to end homelessness, to put people on a path to recovery, so that they can contribute once again. And that should be the thinking that we take to this conversation.
Burnham is throwing another £432m at a problem he failed to solve in Greater Manchester. Under Labour, rough sleeping has hit record highs – yet their answer is always more taxpayers’ money and more empty promises.
[John] Healey must use his budget this week to cut taxes for working people, get the ballooning benefits bill under control, and stop pushing up energy prices.
John Healey is expected to confirm on Wednesday that the full state pension will rise by £489 to £13,036 – equivalent to 3.9%.
However, the rise will push about one million people on low incomes who rely on the state pension above the £12,570 personal allowance threshold, meaning they would be dragged into paying income tax.
EU exit has damaged economy and failed to bring promised benefits, says PM, but he rules out big pre-election changes
Brexit has not “played out” like it was promised to the public, has weakened the economy and the current deal is not good enough, Andy Burnham has said, while ruling out any major changes in the current parliament.
The prime minister said Britain had ended up with a “harder Brexit than was proposed in the referendum campaign” and it had not helped to control the small boats crisis. Backing the home secretary’s tougher immigration rules, he said Brexit had weakened the UK’s ability to control its borders as it could no longer send people back to Europe.
Back to Serbia, we are expecting to hear from two groups of election monitors in the coming hours: first, very shortly, from Serbia’s Center for Research, Transparency and Accountability (CRTA), and then a bit later from a group of international observers, including from the OSCE, the ODIHR, and the European parliament.
I will keep an eye on their findings and bring you the key lines.
A foreign affairs expert’s bleak assessment of the state of global security
Are we on the brink of a new world war? This bleak subject is increasingly invoked by leaders, soldiers and officials, from Donald Trump to Vladimir Putin to the heads of our military and intelligence services. It’s an urgent theme, then, for the FT foreign affairs columnist Gideon Rachman to explore in his latest survey of global diplomacy. Rachman draws his title from the expression, sometimes attributed to Trotsky: “You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you” – the idea being that conflict doesn’t much care whether we like to think about it or not: it will come knocking on our doors regardless.
Clearly, humanity is in a particularly unsafe spot right now, but seeing our security issues laid out like this, catalogued and mapped and analysed, they seem almost overwhelming. To summarise: the most powerful, nuclear-armed states – the US, China and Russia – are led by unscrupulous, self-dealing “strongmen”, each of whom is playing with the nationalist “Great Again” politics epitomised by Trump. Democracy is being rolled back around the world, and even bastions of liberalism such as the UK, France and Germany seem vulnerable to takeover by the Putin-friendly far right. The so-called rules-based international order and its institutions – the UN, the WTO, Nato – are being deliberately undermined by the aforementioned strongmen, and are as weak now as they have ever been.
Maka Gogaladze’s debut feature looks at generational differences in the context of Georgia’s education system and emphasis on collectivism
The scars imprinted on impressionable young minds can never fully fade away. Aiming her lens at a rocky beach thrashed by crashing waves, Maka Gogaladze opens her intimate film with a painful anecdote from her adolescent years. Through on-screen texts against a stormy sky, the Georgian film-maker recalls the time she dumped all of her poems into the garbage. The impulsive decision was a gesture of rebellion against her domineering mother; Gogaladze had wanted her to feel guilty.
This debut feature would appear, at first glance, to be another act of revolt. Putting her mother in front of the camera, Gogaladze asks probing, at times blunt, questions about the strict education thrust on her in childhood. Together, they talk about piano lessons that ended in tears, and tough academic exams that continued to haunt the director well into her adulthood. Their contrasting personalities are fascinatingly revealed across these conversations in all their tension, yet these sequences also represent a moving effort to reach across generational differences.
Pilots report pressure to extend working hours and fears of penalties for declaring themselves unfit to fly
Three in four European airline pilots have taken microsleeps in the cockpit, while almost a quarter routinely fly despite being too fatigued to work, according to a report.
The findings, based on a survey of almost 7,200 captains and first officers by the European Cockpit Association (ECA), include pilots reporting insufficient rest, pressure to extend working hours and fears of being penalised for declaring themselves unfit to fly.
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