Ukraine is about to enter another harsh winter as Russian attacks continue crippling critical infrastructure, even before the coldest days set in.
In an attempt to relieve Kyiv, the Dutch government on Oct. 28 outlined a package of non-military aid worth 1.2 billion euros ($1.3 billion), to be
“Everybody’s focusing on the legal basis of Ursula von der Leyen’s associate membership [with Canada] announcement, but frankly I don’t care,” says MEP Javier Moreno Sánchez.
The Spanish Socialists & Democrats lawmaker chairs the European Parliament’s Canada delegation. He hopes leaders can make the EU and Canada “as close as possible” at the Montréal summit beginning on Thursday (29 October). Hosting the talks is Canadian prime minister Mark Carney, who has repeatedly spoken of ‘middle powers’ such as Canada and the EU deepening cooperation.
In September, EU Commission president Ursula von der Leyen’s announcement of an ‘associate membership’ possibility for Canada caught many by surprise. And there has been no consensus among member states on whether such wording should be used in written agreements with the North American ally.
EUobserver sat down with the MEP Moreno Sánchez in his Brussels office ahead of the major EU-Canada talks.
EU member states struggled to agree on inclusion of the term ‘associate member’ before the Montréal summit. Was it a mistake for EU commission president Ursula von der Leyen to announce this special category if she could not deliver it?
MEP Javier Moreno Sánchez: No, to have made this announcement is positive. I prefer for Canada to be an associate member, but I don’t care about the legal basis; it can be de facto associate membership. It’s true that the concept is not in the treaties, but the euro was not and neither was Schengen. When we have the political will, we don’t need the treaties.
I would like Canada’s relationship to be as strong and as close as possible with the European Union. It means that they will be like Switzerland or Iceland. We won’t have Canadian members in the European Parliament, or commissioners from Canada, but they will be in all the programmes. Now they will participate in Erasmus+, they are participating in SAFE [Security Action for Europe]. And There is big cooperation on artificial intelligence. But we want a horizontal and holistic approach to collaboration, not sector by sector.
Now, everybody’s focusing on the legal basis of Ursula von der Leyen’s associate membership announcement, but frankly I don’t care. As I said in the plenary last week, Canada and the EU share traditions, culture, language, values and principles. So in my view, they are already associated.
What is ‘associate membership’?
This post by my prime minister Pedro Sánchez is what associate membership means.
— Pedro Sánchez (@sanchezcastejon) September 17, 2026
It was very funny because it was 2pm after the State of the Union speech, and I had an interview with people in Ottawa where it was 8am in the morning. I said associate membership is a very positive thing we have to do. And the journalist interviewing me said they’re just seeing this post from PM Sánchez.
What do you think Mark Carney and Ursula von der Leyen should prioritise in the Montréal summit ?
The digital trade agreement. I hope they will agree on that to protect all the consumers and our enterprise. And on critical raw materials, we need an agreement because Canada has everything. In order to not to depend on China, we have to strengthen that relationship. And personally, I’d like to see the EU extend conventions and programs like Erasmus+ to Canada in small steps, little by little.
Should there be free movement between Canada and the EU?
We have to go in this direction. I don’t know exactly at which speed. So little by little, there will be free movement. But if you ask the Council, maybe certain countries will say, “No free movement.”
And how important is it that Canada pays into the European community, particularly when it comes to Ukraine?
I went to Canada only a few months into Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine to meet with people, NGOs, the enterprise and development communities. In every meeting, I was told that Canada wanted to rebuild Ukraine together with Europe once the war was finished. I was a little bit astonished.
One of the reasons is that there are 1.5 million Ukrainian people in Canada. And, Canada is putting money into Erasmus+ by participating in it. And it is willing to put money in all the programs and to work with us.
To what extent is US president Donald Trump responsible for pushing together Canada and the EU?
Thanks to Trump, we have Mark Carney as Canadian prime minister. It was a very good gift from him because Pierre Poilievre was the favourite two months before the elections. And when Trump announced all these shitty things, very proud Canadians decided to vote for Carney. And it was symbolic in Canada. Everybody said, “elbows up.” They are very proud people.
Many Europeans now see the US as a less reliable ally. Do you agree?
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Russia has won the war in Ukraine, and American President Donald Trump’s belated peace efforts are largely irrelevant, says Doug Macgregor.
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Russia has won the war in Ukraine, and American President Donald Trump’s belated peace efforts are largely irrelevant, says Doug Macgregor.
Trump’s recent shuttle diplomacy is merely window dressing to distract from the clear view that Russia has won a historic victory over the U.S.-led NATO proxy war.
Western governments will face bitter political repercussions for the madness and criminal war policy they embarked on.
What Russia is doing now is trying to secure a long-term peace. President Vladimir Putin is politely receiving Trump’s envoy, Steve Witkoff, about holding peace talks.
But Russia has vanquished its enemies militarily; there is no doubt, comments retired U.S. Colonel Macgregor. Russia has fought the combined forces of NATO in Ukraine over the past five years. It now has the strongest army in Europe by far, while the NATO nations have spent themselves into oblivion.
Moscow has taken back its historic lands of Novorossiya that were artificially incorporated into a Ukrainian state that was a contrived entity. That’s why it is falling apart and bequeathing a rump state.
Macgregor says the U.S. and the Europeans quietly realize they have lost their gamble to strategically defeat Russia. What Trump is doing is looking for a bit of good news for the U.S. domestic audience with the appearance of peace mediation. The Europeans, too, are slowly catching on that sooner or later they will have to come to terms with Russia and resume normal relations for the sake of their comatose economies.
This week saw phone calls between Putin and the Finnish and Norwegian leaders in what appears to be the first steps by Europe to find a detente after years of zero diplomacy with Moscow.
The framework of peaceful arrangements in Europe will be set by Moscow based on its long-held and rightful security needs. NATO’s threat to Russia will no longer be tolerated. Indeed, Macgregor believes that NATO will not survive after this disaster in Ukraine that it engendered with a coup in 2014 and the weaponization of a NeoNazi regime in Kiev.
Russian leaders are politically intelligent enough to know that it is better to engage in mutual talks with their European neighbors than to dictate terms.
Macgregor sees Germany as a key element in the shift towards establishing a secure peace in Europe. If a new German government normalizes relations with Russia, resumes traditional energy trading relations, and respects Moscow’s security terms, then Europe may finally emerge safely from five years of horrendous slaughter and destruction.
The U.S. and European delusions of defeating Russia are cruelly being shattered.
Colonel Douglas Macgregor is a highly decorated U.S. Army veteran. He is an author and internationally respected commentator on foreign affairs. Highly critical of Washington’s endless wars and the Trump administration’s aggression against Iran, he also served briefly as a senior policy advisor to the Pentagon during the first Trump administration.
Incumbent president Iliana Yotova is leading Bulgaria’s 2026 presidential election race, alongside her running mate, Kiril Vulchev, securing 47.3 percent support among likely voters, according to a poll released on Wednesday (21 October).
Andrei Gyurov, a former caretaker prime minister, and his running mate, Georgi Kandev, rank second with around 30 percent. Leaving the pro-Russian Kostadin Kostadinov and Petar Volgin is in third place on just over ten percent.
Bulgaria is voting on Sunday (25 October) and the vote can be seen as “a test of the government’s stability”, according to Ivaylo Iliev, a political scientist, with whom we analyse Bulgarian presidential elections in three points.
The election could consolidate political influence around prime minister Rumen Radev, or expose the limits of his camp’s support.
The PM’s Progressive Bulgaria, which secured a parliamentary majority in April 2026, is facing criticism over its budget plans and handling of security threats. Recent attacks on merchant vessels in the Black Sea have raised questions about Bulgaria’s ability to protect its interests and reassure its allies.
Iotova, who served as Radev’s vice-president for nine years, is closely associated with the prime minister. And her victory could be interpreted as an endorsement of the governing camp.
“Radev has his candidate in these elections and he is obviously the favourite to win a second round,” Iliev says.
However, the Black Sea attacks have “definitely negatively affected both” Iotova’s campaign and public confidence in the government’s security response, he adds.
The government’s response, alongside its nuanced position on Russia’s war against Ukraine, may appeal to voters sceptical of confrontation with Moscow. At the same time, it also risks complicating Bulgaria’s relations with its European and Nato partners.
“Radev demonstrates two different types of behaviour”, says Iliev.
On the domestic front, he is “balanced”, “vague” or even “without specifics”, Iliev says. For Radev does not want “to cause discontent among his pro-Russian voters”.
On the foreign policy however, Radev is more seeking to get as close as possible to the European consensus, but “with a minimal effort.”
The second question is whether the presidency can act as a counterweight to the executive or will reinforce the same centre of political influence.
Gyurov’s campaign has warned against putting “all the eggs in one basket”. Concentrating power around Radev and Iotova could weaken independent scrutiny he says.
A Gyurov victory could give the presidency a more “independent voice”, says Iliev.
However, institutional checks and balances do not necessarily translate into electoral support.
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France is facing one of its worst political, social and fiscal crises in years, and there is a sense things will get worse before they get better.
What started in September as high-school protests over teacher shortages and poor education standards in the Paris suburbs later grew into a much wider revolt over soaring fuel and living costs, a public sector pay freeze and a proposed austerity budget.
Last Saturday (17 October), public anger exploded into nationwide riots. More than half a million people took to the streets across France. Most marched peacefully. But violence broke out on the sidelines in several cities, with looting, arson and clashes with police.
When things finally calmed down, nearly 2,400 people had been arrested, interior minister Laurent Nuñez later said.
But even as protesters demand more teachers, smaller classes, higher wages and cheaper fuel, investors have been selling off French government bonds, worried that France cannot rein in its spending.
The gap between French and German 10-year borrowing costs, an important gauge of financial stability in the eurozone, reached almost 151 basis points on Tuesday, the widest since the eurozone debt crisis of 2011-2012.
But French politics is too divided to agree on the spending cuts bond traders want to see. And with presidential elections due in April, a quick resolution looks unlikely.
That leaves the central bank. The European Central Bank (ECB) could buy up French debt to bring borrowing costs down. It may even be forced to, if bond market panic spreads. But bailing out France is politically explosive, and depends on the judgement of the bank’s 27-member governing council.
For the time being, the ECB “is unlikely to say or do anything helpful,” Shahin Vallée, a senior associate fellow at the German Council on Foreign Relations (DGAP), wrote in a recent blog post.
Vallée, who is now an advisor to institutional investors, previously worked for Herman Van Rompuy who was European Council president during the eurozone crisis. He then joined Emmanuel Macron, France’s economy minister at the time, as advisor.
That background means he can speak with authority on everything from macroeconomics and bond markets to French politics and fiscal woes. EUobserver reached out to him to see what comes next.
Last week you were in Bangkok, where the IMF urged rich and poor countries to cut deficits and get debt under control. Is that the right medicine for France?
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The latest period in Russian literature, which evidently began on February 24, 2022, just as it did in education and science, has so far received little systematic study. There are, of course, more and more conference papers and articles on individual authors and phenomena, and conferences now bring together dozens of specialists. Clearly, systematic book-length studies of this period’s literature can only be published outside Russia, and foreign scholars are helping make them possible. Some of them have taken on the painstaking work of tracking every significant new release and translating and analyzing these texts. One of them, French literary scholar Antoine Nicolle, recently defended his doctoral dissertation, Facing the War, Facing Oneself: Russian Literary Dissidence after February 2022. It is effectively the first attempt to systematically map the part of Russian literature usually described as anti-war or oppositional. T-invariant asked Nicolle how a scholar who started out as a Rimbaud specialist got hooked on contemporary Russian literature, how that literature has responded to Russia’s aggression against Ukraine and the suffering it has brought to that country, and what “being Russian” means for Russian writers today.
Participant Observation
T-invariant: How did your dissertation get started? As I understand it, you were collecting the material in real time, right alongside the research.
Antoine Nicolle: Circumstances made the decision for me. I started out in French literature — I was a specialist in Rimbaud and the nineteenth century. For three years, back before COVID, I worked in Moscow at the French University College. That’s when I picked up a new subject: Russian rock, and especially Yegor Letov, the frontman and voice of the Siberian punk band Grazhdanskaya Oborona (Civil Defense) and a cult figure in Russian rock. Around 2021, I started a project on how Letov had been politicized in Russia. After my job in Moscow ended, I planned to go back to collect interviews and other material. But after February 24, all of that suddenly became impossible: I couldn’t go back, and many of the cultural figures I wanted to talk to had taken an openly pro-war stance. In March 2022, I read on Facebook that Linor Goralik was launching the ROAR project and gathering texts by the contemporary literary opposition (ROAR, the Russian Oppositional Arts Review, is an online magazine of anti-war literature founded by Linor Goralik in 2022. — T-invariant). We knew each other, and she was looking for translators, so I wrote to say I wanted to translate from Russian into French. That was the first time I seriously engaged with the most recent Russian literature, and my dissertation advisor in Paris told me: “Drop your old topic and work on this. It’s important, and it’s happening right now.”
T-INVARIANT BACKGROUND
Antoine Nicolle (b. 1992) is a French literary scholar, Slavicist, and translator. He studied at the École normale supérieure in Paris (ENS Ulm) and at the Sorbonne, and studied Russian at the National Institute for Oriental Languages and Civilizations (INALCO). In November 2025, he defended his doctoral dissertation at INALCO, Facing the War, Facing Oneself: Russian Literary Dissidence after February 2022. He has taught French and comparative literature at the French University College in Moscow (2018–2021) and Paris Nanterre University (2021–2022), and Russian literature at Clermont Auvergne University (2023–2025) and Bordeaux Montaigne University (since 2025). He has published scholarly work on Rimbaud, ancient poetry, and contemporary Russian literature, in journals including Rimbaud Vivant, Parade sauvage, and Savoirs en prisme. His writing has also appeared in Le Monde. In 2021, together with Sylvia Chassaing, he founded the independent publishing house Sampizdat Éditions. He has translated into French works by Yegor Letov, Alexander Brener, Svetlana Petriychuk, Pavel Pryazhko, and other contemporary authors. In 2022, he headed ROAR’s French translation team. He is a member of ArtAtWar, an international research project on Russian and Ukrainian literature in wartime.
T-i: So before that, you hadn’t worked on contemporary Russian literature at all?
AN: Not at all. I’d read a few things, but it wasn’t my research field. I worked on Rimbaud until I was about twenty-five. Then I moved to Russia and became a Slavicist. I’ve only been speaking Russian for nine years; before that, I didn’t know a word. Everything was new: not just the library work, but also working with living people.
T-i: In your dissertation, you describe your position as a researcher as “embedded.” What do you mean by that?
AN: Many Russianists in France have either Russian roots or personal ties to the country. I have neither, and nearly all my friends there have left. My personal history with Russia comes down to three years of living there, from 2017 to 2020. When I arrived, I knew almost nothing about the country. I lived through everything that happened after February 2022 both personally and through the eyes of other people, some close to me and some less so.
Being embedded is the particular position of a researcher who studies what is happening right now, before our eyes. You don’t have the historical distance that would let you tell what will turn out to matter, and you don’t have an established body of scholarship to lean on. Still, you can always get something out of this shaky position: it frees you from hierarchies of importance and lets you place “great” authors and complete unknowns on an equal footing, and likewise texts written for the moment and those that will eventually end up in history textbooks about this period. All the authors are just as caught up in what’s happening as you are.
Top news on scientists’ work and experiences during the war, along with videos and infographics — subscribe to the T-invariant Telegram channel to stay updated.
T-i: And why do these Russian debates strike such a nerve with people in France today?
AN: We’re having our own conversations about what would happen if our country swung to the right as well. How would the history textbooks be rewritten? What would be allowed and what wouldn’t? For now, it’s hypothetical, but we know it could become reality. I think people in the US get that now, too. It mattered to me to measure my own position, as a Frenchman anxiously bracing for a “right turn,” against what people in Russia are going through. At the same time, I never forgot that I was looking at all this from the outside. I lived in Russia during the last prewar years, starting in 2017, but I lived in my expat bubble and didn’t really see what was going on. A lot of it I only understood later, sitting at my laptop and reading texts. That’s why it’s so important to me to talk to people who lived through all this from the inside, and why I wanted someone who is part of Russian literary life on my dissertation committee. That person was Larissa Muravieva, a literary scholar who studies contemporary Russian prose and autofiction.
The New Geography of Russian Literature
T-i: How much interest is there in France in Russian literature of the past few years, both as a subject of scholarship and as something for literary critics to write about?
AN: I’m not the only one working on this in France. Fellow researchers of mine are writing about contemporary Russian-language literature right now, and I often draw on their work. I’m also part of ArtAtWar, a large project led by Victoire Feuillebois that looks at what has happened to the literary canon in Russia and Ukraine during the current war, and at new ways of studying literature in this context.
Bella Delacroix-Ostromooukhova studies Russian books and publishers for children and teenagers. Kateryna Tarasiuk wrote her dissertation on women’s writing by the younger generation. Sylvia Chassaing is now studying contemporary Russian creative writing schools. And Victoire herself has published a book on “Pushkinfall” [the removal of Pushkin monuments across Ukraine, by analogy with the earlier “Leninfall,” the toppling of Lenin statues there — T-invariant]: Faut-il brûler Pouchkine? (Must We Burn Pushkin?). Those are just a few examples. For several years, the Sorbonne also hosted a seminar, L’Observatoire du sensible (“The Observatory of the Sensible”), which brought in contemporary Russian-language authors and their French translators. Overall, it’s a fairly active community, and a lot of young researchers are involved.
T-i: What makes Russian literature from this particular period interesting? Why is it worth studying?
AN: I don’t think this period is more important than any other. But as someone who lived through it, I felt that nothing mattered more to me. And I wasn’t the only one. French Slavic studies went through a serious crisis after the war began, for exactly the same reasons Russian intellectuals did: the sense that we hadn’t seen any of it coming, that we’d failed to understand something about Putinism, that post-Soviet Russia had turned out to be something other than what we thought. On top of that, there was a political split: just as among Russians, some people are pro-Putin and some are against him. In that context, what was happening in literature, both in Russia and among émigrés, became very important. Many older colleagues who had spent their whole careers on “old” topics suddenly started reading contemporary texts.
T-i: But why literature, and not political commentary, television, film, or social media?
AN: Today’s political polarization is reflected on social media and in political commentary, and the polarization itself creates an expectation that everyone will take a clear political stand. Literature reflects that polarization, but it is also a space for a kind of “candor,” where a person, alone with themselves, faces the unknown: things about themselves that even they don’t yet understand.
At the same time, it was important to me not to shut myself away in literature, and instead to compare what people were writing, even in poems, with what was happening in the country and what people were arguing about. Honestly, I even feel a bit guilty about working on literature at a time like this. I tried, on the one hand, to do what I know how to do, and on the other, to say something meaningful and useful for people other than literary scholars.
T-i: Did it work?
AN: A little, I hope. My dissertation committee included Gilles Favarel-Garrigues, a political scientist from Sciences Po. When I asked him to join, he said he knew nothing about literature and couldn’t serve as an expert. But after reading the dissertation, he told me it had helped him understand some things about contemporary Russia and its politics, which is exactly his field. Something comes through in contemporary Russian literature that is easier to see there than anywhere else.
T-i: Is there a specific example where literature turns out to be more powerful than other media?
AN: Yes, I write about it in the chapter “Where Were We for Eight Years” [a reference to the pro-war catchphrase “Where were you for eight years?” aimed at critics of the invasion, who were supposedly silent about the war in Donbas after 2014 — T-invariant]. It’s about the prose of Elena Kostyuchenko, a Novaya Gazeta journalist and writer, who in 2023 published an autobiographical book, My Beloved Country [published in English as I Love Russia: Reporting from a Lost Country — T-invariant].
Asking whether “the people” as a single collective entity is guilty gets you nowhere if you want to understand anything or change anything. Kostyuchenko, like other writers, writes instead about the responsibility of specific segments of post-Soviet society: generations and social groups. There’s no self-flagellation here, and she doesn’t strike a holier-than-thou pose. There’s only a careful examination of the question, based on an analysis of herself and her own history. There isn’t a word about some abstract “people,” only about a specific habitus, shaped, for example, by specific social circumstances and upbringing.
T-i: How did you choose your texts and authors? And what does the term “anti-war” actually mean in your book?
AN: That was very hard, and to be honest, I don’t have a definitive answer. But I didn’t want to work on Z-literature [pro-war writing, named after the “Z” symbol of Russia’s invasion — T-invariant]. That subject interests me now, but back then I decided it would be too much. The anti-war segment of literature is almost impossible to define strictly. One option was to write only about émigré literature, since so many people had left. But what was happening inside Russia mattered to me, too. And unlike in earlier waves of emigration, the internet plays a huge role: texts from inside Russia and from émigrés are published side by side, often anonymously.
T-i: Does anonymity also create an ethical problem?
AN: Yes. It gets complicated when you write about authors who you know for a fact are against the war and don’t support Putin’s regime but can’t say so openly. You can’t just sit in France and casually announce that so-and-so is “actually” anti-war. For a while, I thought you couldn’t write about these authors at all. In the end, I decided you could, as long as I don’t speak for them or say more than they say themselves.
T-i: Where does this literature even exist, given the censorship in Russia?
AN: The literary field has become transnational and torn apart. Inside the country, censorship at first only banned certain topics, but now it increasingly prescribes a new mandatory patriotic canon, forcing even pro-war authors to adapt. Some authors publish anonymously; some don’t publish at all and withdraw into “internal emigration.” Meanwhile, something is taking shape alongside all this that people are already calling the “new tamizdat” [literally “published over there”: in Soviet times, banned works published abroad and smuggled back into the USSR — T-invariant]: ROAR magazine, publishers like Freedom Letters, and bookstores, all of them outside Russia. Some institutions, like the annual Lyubimovka festival of new plays, have emigrated. The field is split along two fault lines: the first runs between those for and against the war, the second between those who left and those who stayed. And in between lies a huge “gray zone” of people who take no clear position at all.
T-i: You write about “the curse of literature-centrism.” What do you mean by that?
AN: Conversations about Russian identity and the imperial legacy almost always come down to literature and the great writers, as if it were books, and not the concrete decisions of citizens, that make the world go round.
It’s a very old idea that goes back to the nineteenth century, and as a former specialist in that era, I’ve been caught up in it myself. These days, though, I find it rather foreign, which is why I deliberately included people from outside literature in the scope of my analysis — rappers, for example.
What I ended up with is a study not of literature but of the verbal culture of this period, covering literature, theater, and music (pop, rap, and rock).
T-i: So how accurate is the term “anti-war literature” in the first place?
AN: Terminology is a big problem in general right now. “Dissidence” is an old word, and so is inakomyslie, “thinking otherwise.” Not all émigré writers are anti-war, and not all anti-war writers are émigrés. I had a whole range of options, and none of them fit perfectly. In the end, I took a negative approach: I’m interested not in people who hold particular ideas or take up particular themes, but in those who are affected by the situation in some way and don’t pretend nothing is happening. What interests me is precisely how different that can look. There are openly anti-war writers; there are those who don’t support the war but “write through the war”; there are those who turn to distant subjects and periods; and there are those who make a point of leaving things unsaid. Within this “community of those who care,” which looks unified at first glance, you can see many dividing lines, some of which surface, for example, in old disputes between liberals and leftists.
The Problem of Identity
T-i: Why is your dissertation called Facing the War, Facing Oneself?
AN: There’s “war” in the narrow sense: the fighting on Ukrainian soil, which inevitably makes literature look at the other. But there’s also the “catastrophe”: everything the war has done to Russian society itself, including repression, emigration, broken family ties and friendships, and the collapse of any sense of the future. That means looking at yourself. I take the word “catastrophe” from postwar German thought, from the German historian Friedrich Meinecke and from Karl Jaspers. The war turns out to be a kind of mirror: you look at it, and you’re forced to look at yourself.
But this also raises ethical problems, which I examine specifically in several chapters of the dissertation. At a time like this, looking at yourself is inevitable, but in doing so, you turn away from the suffering of the people living under the bombs. As if the war were a catastrophe only for Russia.
T-i: What is the central question of your work?
AN: What it means to be Russian now. For me, that’s the most important thing. The three chapters on the role of media and testimony stand somewhat apart. The questions there are more traditional, about the relationship between image and writing, but in the end they, too, come down to the same thing: how you look at what your country is doing, and whether it’s still your country.
T-i: Which works of contemporary Russian literature best capture this identity crisis?
AN: There’s a whole spectrum. There’s the attempt to save the “real Russia” by separating it from the state. I examine the old idea of “two Russias” (in Rozanov, Lermontov, and Zaitsev) and compare it with Thomas Mann’s argument that “there are not two Germanys, a good one and a bad one.” There’s a subtler move by philosopher and writer Oxana Timofeeva: the warm “homeland” versus the cold “fatherland” [rodina and otechestvo in Russian — T-invariant]. There’s homeland as language, in the poetry of Vera Polozkova and in producer Roma Liberov’s poetry-and-music project After Russia (2023), in which émigré musicians such as Noize MC and Monetochka set to music poems by writers of the first wave of Russian emigration. The project’s title was deliberately borrowed from a collection by Marina Tsvetaeva. And then there’s radical rupture, “symbolic suicide,” the renunciation of Russianness: in the book I Wish Ashes Upon My Home by poet and feminist activist Daria Serenko, and in the work of artist Sveta Eitik (she filmed a video of her Russian passport burning in the snow, a gesture renouncing Russianness).
Finally, there’s a way of redefining one’s identity that I call decolonial re-rooting: members of non-Russian peoples returning to their ancestral languages and roots. Take the Berlin-based Tatar poet Dinara Rasuleva, who is returning to Tatar, a language that seemed embarrassing and “backwoods” to her as a child. In the zine Cyclicity, in its 2024 issue Roots, authors from Russia who belong to non-Russian ethnic groups write about going back to their origins, for example to the Karelian language. Or the documentary play Vepsian Women: A Charm for Life by Ksenia Savelyeva and Nastasya Fedorova, presented at Lyubimovka in 2023, which is performed in the Veps language [the language of a small Finnic people in northwestern Russia — T-invariant] in the voices of Vepsian women themselves. A separate strand in this reworking of identity is the image of a dead, “unburied” Russia, a “zombie state.” Drawing on the work of cultural historian Alexander Etkind and literary scholar Oleg Lekmanov, I show how the invasion of Ukraine appears as the latest in a long series of symptoms of a chronic disease in society.
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T-i: Is the decolonial turn in Russian literature something new?
AN: It’s more that it has sped up. Back in the 2010s, various writers and performers were already feeling their way toward it, bringing their native languages and the theme of national identity into Russian-language songs. There’s the duo AIGEL, fronted by Tatar poet and singer Aigel Gaisina, whose hit “Tatarin” (“The Tatar”) was all over Russia back in 2017. It had elements of self-exoticization and played on stereotypes, but in the years that followed, the duo took a much more explicitly decolonial line. There’s Manizha, a singer with Tajik roots, who represented Russia at Eurovision 2021 with the song “Russian Woman.” And the phenomenon has even deeper roots: the Soviet policy of korenizatsiya (“indigenization”) in the 1920s, which promoted national languages before giving way to Stalinist Russification, and the national revivals of the late 1980s and early 1990s…
The Problem of the Witness
T-i: A significant part of your work is devoted to describing and distinguishing between the positions of the spectator and the witness. Why does that matter?
AN: As a rule, a Russian anti-war author doesn’t experience the war physically. The image of the war created by the media can be a window onto someone else’s reality, but also a screen that shuts it out. In an age when conflicts are so heavily mediatized, anyone can feel like a witness. But of course, that isn’t so. Even in Ukraine, the positions of witness and spectator are problematic. To explore this question, I turn to the prose of the Ukrainian-Israeli writer Karine Arutyunova. She plays with the back-and-forth between the “frame” and what lies outside it, asks “what percentage of war is in each of us,” and shows that even under the bombs, people still follow the war through the media.
T-i: And how do Russian writers reflect on the role of the media?
AN: The first thing I look at is the generational conflict over media: the portrayal of an older generation zombified by propaganda and a younger one that turns to alternative sources of information. Take, for example, Pussy Riot’s song “Mama, Don’t Watch TV” or Natalya Lizorkina’s play Vanya Is Alive, in which the mother’s “zombie box” [Russian slang for a TV set pumping out state propaganda — T-invariant] is pitted against her son’s smartphone. In both cases, a conversation between the generations turns out to be impossible. Essentially, it isn’t people who are arguing but the TV and YouTube, propaganda and counterpropaganda, and “here” and “there” correspond to incompatible media regimes.
T-i: And this analysis of how writers reflect on the media ultimately leads you to the voices of Ukraine?
AN: Yes. Galina Rymbu told Russian poets point-blank: you are not witnesses, so make a decolonial effort and just listen to the voices from here. I have chapters in which a Russian author tries to bear witness to something they haven’t lived through themselves, and it often ends up being a conversation about themselves.
Berlin-based poet and performer Alexander Delfinov offers a kind of “meta-testimony” that directly echoes Akhmatova’s Requiem. Dmitry Bykov sees and depicts refugees as if from a “drone’s-eye view,” almost a God’s-eye view. Personally, I find a different strategy more productive, a kind of “creative listening.” That means translation (Rymbu, for one, translates Ukrainian poets) and mediation, as in the work of Polina Barskova, a poet and historian of the Siege of Leningrad, who approaches someone else’s catastrophe through the catastrophe of Babyn Yar and the poems about it by the Ukrainian poet Marianna Kiyanovska.
Three Roles of the Russian Writer
T-i: So the very status of the Russian writer is being called into question?
AN: Of course, there’s a crisis going on right now. But it’s happening because the writer’s role had already changed profoundly over the previous decades. This applies specifically to highbrow literature, which is rooted in the old notion of the writer as the voice of the people, an indispensable political and social force.
Solzhenitsyn, Grossman, the voices of people who survived the Siege of Leningrad: these were necessary, irreplaceable voices and testimonies. Ours is a different era, and those great examples can’t be repeated, for several reasons.
First, the testimony about the war in Ukraine belongs to Ukrainians. Russia is not the main victim of this war, as many people have pointed out in recent years. Second, in our era the writer no longer has a monopoly on bearing witness. When the media were liberalized in the 1990s, new kinds of writers emerged who took on that mission, above all investigative journalists. As early as the 2000s, Anna Politkovskaya sharply condemned Russian writers who wrote about the Chechen wars while sitting comfortably in Moscow or St. Petersburg. The rethinking of that role began back then.
But tradition, habit, and the literary ethos still carry a lot of weight. I have a sense that some authors aren’t ready to give up their monopoly and their special role. I’m thinking, for instance, of the prophecies Dmitry Bykov has made in recent years. In an interview with Radio Liberty in January 2023, he said, “2023 will be more interesting than 2022. Mark my words. I can name the key points: March, April, November,” and he kept on prophesying like that all the way to the late 2040s. Is he being ironic? I hope so, but I’m afraid not. True, when writers set out to rethink their role, they often hit a dead end. But reflecting on mistakes and dead ends is one of the functions of literature that I study in the dissertation.
What’s really being tested is how far a writer can resist narcissism. Russian authors are being asked to give things up: their own “I,” their central place in the conversation, sometimes even literature itself. They’re asked to become translators, mediators, mere vessels for someone else’s voice. There are two main dangers here. One is “vampirism,” when someone else’s voice is swallowed up by your own writing. The other is reducing the encounter to silence, when it serves only as an occasion for the author to declare that they can’t share someone else’s pain.
T-i: Why is the backstory, what happened before 2022, so important for a study of the present? And which chronological milestones turned out to matter most for you?
AN: You can’t understand the present outside its context, especially when almost everyone says they didn’t see any of it coming.
In general, I’m fascinated by how people change their views. That’s why I took on Letov, a man who radically changed his position several times, going from anarchist and anti-fascist to almost the opposite extreme. For most of the authors I write about, the Putin era is the backdrop against which they grew up and went through major changes.
What interests me is how a community that looked unified from the outside splits apart under the strain of war and emigration, and how people change along the way. To see that, you have to take the broader context into account: the entire post-Soviet period.
Different traditions and ideas about the writer’s role coexist today, and they took shape along different historical and social trajectories. There are writers who embody the old image of the writer as a member of the intelligentsia who believes in the power of words, like Dmitry Bykov, whom I’ve already mentioned. There are authors of more intellectual popular fiction who nonetheless took a firm public stance as early as the 1990s or 2000s, like Boris Akunin. And there are new politically engaged and left-wing authors for whom feminist, decolonial, and new social issues matter more than the old debates. All these traditions and generations coexist in today’s literary field. They lived through the crises of 2011–2012 and 2014 differently, and they understand their role differently. How they reacted to the events of 2022 and the years since was shaped by the positions they had formed over the preceding decades.
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T-i: But why, when it comes to the literary field, do you treat 2011–2012 and the Bolotnaya protests [the mass protests against electoral fraud, named after Moscow’s Bolotnaya Square — T-invariant] as more important than 2014? It seems to me that 2014 was the moment of truth for many people: the divisions that emerged then were reproduced almost unchanged in 2022, and many people’s decisions to emigrate date back to the period right after Crimea. And what about the 2008 war with Georgia? That was a very important moment, a kind of dress rehearsal for 2022: the same provocation, the same escalation, the same unprovoked aggression, the same imperial motives, just compressed into a matter of weeks and, fortunately, with fewer casualties.
AN: I probably focused on 2011–2012 because that’s when protest was at its most vivid and visible, including in cultural circles, before people started looking for new ways to resist or gave up resisting altogether. But you’re right: I don’t say enough about 2014. I felt that myself when I reread that chapter. For the book, by the way, it’s a great question to ask the people who left: when did they realize they would have to leave?
T-i: Another big subject is how literature deals with guilt and responsibility. What’s the best way to approach that problem?
AN: In the first weeks after the invasion, everyone was talking about it. And in those discussions, I recognized echoes of conversations in France: What if we, too, end up like the people who later say, “I didn’t see anything, I didn’t do anything”? I started reading Arendt and Jaspers, like everybody else. But I realized that the question of responsibility often leads nowhere. Fine, we’ve answered “yes” or “no.” Now what?
T-i: So that theoretical framework itself, Jaspers and Arendt, is no longer enough?
AN: That’s exactly how I felt.
There’s something too simple about those works for the world we live in now. It’s either back to the USSR or back to the Third Reich. Sometimes it seems these conversations just give people an excuse to do nothing, since nothing changes anyway. We need to come up with some alternative to break out of this loop, and stop putting so much weight on the category of “the people.” But I’m not a philosopher, and I can’t offer that alternative myself.
T-i: And this is where literature helps again?
AN: Yes, that’s exactly what I’m betting on. I’m interested in how different authors talk about responsibility and how they define what it consists of. In My Beloved Country, Elena Kostyuchenko bitterly describes the “golden chains” of the generation that got rich under the “petrostate.” Here I also bring in the band IC3PEAK, whose protest song “Death No More” is about a generation shackled by the “golden chains” of comfort. And I work with the stance of “false naivety”: these writers show us how the comfort of the “petrostate” lulled the political conscience to sleep, so that a generation’s responsibility grows out of its very inaction. I examine the escapist stance through the prose of Evgenia Nekrasova, Noize MC’s song “Cryochambers,” and Monetochka’s work, and the justification of emigration through Boris Akunin’s The Demon’s Advocate and Noize MC’s song “Land of Rain.”
T-i: What roles does the Russian author try on in this situation?
AN: Mainly three. The indirect victim: someone whose life has been wrecked by repression and exile. The presumed culprit: a bearer of “imperial consciousness” and heir to a “guilty” culture. And the powerless spectator: someone who watches other people’s pain on a screen. Essentially, my whole dissertation is about how these three figures collide within a single person.
T-i: You write a lot about a new literary movement, or genre: autofiction, prose in which authors write about themselves, mixing fact and fiction. Is it an attempt to break out of the closed loop of literature-centrism, or an attempt to renew literature?
AN: I think we need to go back to how autofiction is defined in the first place. I sometimes count as autofiction autobiographical texts that contain very little invention. Larissa Muravieva writes a lot about exactly this. But in the dissertation, genre boundaries didn’t concern me much. When your main point of reference is an ethical question, it often doesn’t matter what in a book is real and what’s made up.
T-i: In discussing autofiction, you introduce the concept of “scriptotherapy” (healing and consolation through writing) and argue that Russian authors’ autofiction often slides back into narcissistic self-admiration. But are there cases where scriptotherapy is useful and productive?
AN: It can always be useful. In fact, it’s very important to distinguish between writing as a creative act and publication, that is, addressing an audience.
Why do people write? In the first weeks of the full-scale invasion, that became the central question. People write for themselves, and if someone needs to, they need to, end of story. People write for their own circle: friends, acquaintances, kindred spirits. In that case, writing, or creative work in general, becomes a place where people recognize each other and connect. People write for everyone, and become “writers.” And people write for likes.
But the line between all these practices is sometimes very blurry, and it’s an interesting thing to study. Galina Rymbu wrote a very important text about this in the first days of the war. I study some examples that I find significant — Vera Pavlova’s poems, for instance. “Morning in the gazette, evening in a sonnet,” she said of her war poems [a play on the Soviet-era saying about topical satire: “Morning in the paper, evening in a couplet” — T-invariant]. And I’d add: “straight on the internet,” because in her case the “sonnet” isn’t the end of the process. A person who writes draws on certain traditions, on ideas about what writing is and what it’s supposed to do, and also on their own sense of how they want to come across to others. I don’t believe in one hundred percent candor, but I do believe in the sincerity of the attempts to achieve it, and that the different functions of writing are closely intertwined.
T-i: What do you see as the main result of your work, and what does it offer readers outside Slavic studies?
AN: Confronted with the events of the war, Russian anti-war literature finds itself face to face, above all, with itself. It is living through the collapse of the writer’s old poses, the breakdown of the idea of “Russianness,” and a crisis of testimony, and it is agonizing over the problem of responsibility. And in this inward-looking, “hot” writing, with its silences and masks, I think the scale of the catastrophe comes through more honestly than in direct ideological debates. And the questions of guilt, exile, and responsibility for what your country does are, sadly, not uniquely Russian.
The post The questions of guilt and of responsibility for what your country does are, sadly, not uniquely Russian.” French Slavicist Antoine Nicolle on Russian Literature after 2022 appeared first on Т-инвариант / T-invariant.
As protests continue to ripple across European cities, the Italian Green MEP Benedetta Scuderi reflects on her own experiences of police repression, from holding a peace flag near a Brussels protest to facing the fury that followed the flotilla to Gaza. She spoke to EUobserver about the EU’s housing priorities, Italy’s elections, and how the far-right has captured freedom of expression for its own use.
You were detained by police in July, a few hundred meters from a far-right protest calling for “re-migration”. How has the rise of the far-right stalled some key areas, like freedom of speech?
The rise of the far-right is really threatening European democracy as we know it. It has never been perfect, but it allowed people to protest. Now, we only let certain people express their dissent.
In the European Parliament, people can discriminate and use hate speech because of their freedom of expression, but as you go out of parliament with a Palestinian flag, then you’re a terrorist. So, how is it possible that last Strasbourg plenary, I could hear my colleagues saying that Muslims are a threat, and there are no consequences? And then I go out and I say, “Free Palestine,” and I’ll be arrested.
This double standard is extremely problematic. The fact that not allowing fascist symbols within the parliament also meaning that no other symbol can be shown, is not okay. Because we need to be fine to say that certain things are discriminatory and against European values, without having to say that everything else is not allowed.
We also need to be able to accept dissent. What is happening all over Europe, with violence increasing towards activists, we’re seeing it target only a certain kind of activists. In Italy, fascist protests are ignored by police. Farmers can come to the parliament with tractors, and that’s completely fine. And then we have 20 people doing a sit-in for Palestine in front of the parliament, and getting their heads smashed.
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U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio sought to reassure Greece that Kimberly Guilfoyle’s departure would not diminish its importance to Washington, promising a successor with access to President Trump and his full confidence. “Greece deserves a strong and good ambassador that has access to and the confidence of the president,” Mr. Rubio told Matthew Boyle […]
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“The issue is, do we have another leader to replace Pedro Sánchez?”.
Former Spanish congresswoman Hana Jalloul Muro is among her prime minister’s closest allies in the European Parliament.
“It has not been an easy mandate. Every day is a survival day, all the challenges that prime minister Pedro Sánchez has faced have been unprecedented,” the Socialists and Democrats (S&D) MEP told EUobserver.
They had faced the Covid pandemic, a volcanic eruption in the Canary Islands in 2021, and the migrant crisis in the Ceuta enclave in north Africa in the summer of 2026, she said – not to mention the corruption allegations levelled at his close relatives.
And he now risked being unseated in a snap election on 5 October, called after nationwide protests against lack of affordable housing.
Sánchez’ PSOE party is trailing behind the centre right people’s party (PP) in the polls, which is also growing closer allied to the increasingly successful far-right Vox party.
“These elections will pit two models against each other,” Jalloul said.
“On the one hand, a progressive government that defends public services, improves wages and pensions, expands rights and protects the social majority. And on the other, a model represented by the PP and Vox, which, wherever they govern, have opted for privatisations and policies that risk widening inequalities,” she said.
Jalloul, who spoke to EUobserver at the European Parliament (EP) in Brussels, used to lecture on international terrorism at the University of Madrid, before she became vice-chair of the EP’s foreign affairs committee.
And she recalled the heated debate on the Ceuta incident on 31 July, including accusations that Morocco had engineered it to gain leverage over Spain.
“This is a crisis that we could not expect,” she said.
But had there not been a “good relationship with Morocco, [we] would never be able to return 90 percent of the 70,000 people that came in less than 72 hours,” she added.
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Nearly three decades after the Dayton Peace Agreement ended the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the country remains deeply divided along ethnic and political lines.
The agreement brought peace, but its complex political system has done little to overcome those divisions. Republika Srpska, the predominantly Serb entity, has pursued an increasingly divergent political course, while Serbia and Croatia maintain close ties with different parts of the country.
And for Christian Schmidt, the international community’s high representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina (2021-26) the main threat is no longer a return to war, but political stagnation and growing frustration.
He says that weak civic engagement, slow progress towards EU membership and the influence of Russia and neighbouring countries are reinforcing Bosnia’s divisions. Young people, he says, are increasingly responding by leaving the country.
In this interview, Schmidt discusses foreign influence, the EU’s role, the legacy of Dayton, and why Bosnia’s future may depend on whether it can build a stronger political community across its ethnic divisions.
You started your work in Bosnia and Herzegovina in 2021 and were there for five years. It was a period of major changes, with COVID and then the war in Ukraine. What were your experiences of these moments. How has the situation in Bosnia evolved?
I think there has not been sufficient involvement. Civil society in Bosnia and Herzegovina is not very strong. It is, more than just politically, somehow divided on political issues. This prevents a joint political position or commitment from civil society to make more progress in democratic development and European integration.
So far, I don’t see that this has changed very much. It has also not changed that some parties, especially the SNSD, [Serb nationalist Milorad] Dodik’s party, but honestly not only them, are counting on ethnic differences as an argument for supporting their party instead of having a multi-ethnic approach. One can be doubtful about their real pro-European commitment.
When civil society is not engaged and when countries are not politically stable, we know that they are prone to interference from other states or political entities. Is this being seen in Bosnia and Herzegovina?
It is evident that neighbouring countries, especially Serbia and Croatia, have a kind of preferred relationship with parts of the country. This is, by the way, also established in the General Framework Agreement for Peace in Bosnia and Herzegovina [also known as the Dayton Peace Agreement]. So it is not necessarily something that is not in line with Dayton [Agreement].
But there is beyond this more interference if I refer, for example, to Serbia’s reaction on the occasion of the United Nations General Assembly Resolution of 2024 about establishing an international day of commemoration for the Srebrenica genocide. There was a really remarkable attack against this, despite the fact that Serbia was not named in the resolution. There were only named individuals who had committed war crimes or genocide.
But it was used to create a “Pan-Serbian declaration”, which can be seen as a way of bringing cultural issues of the same ethnic group closer together. It has to be seen additionally as a tool to try to gain more political influence in the other part of the country.
You mentioned Croatia and Serbia. Is Russia also playing a role in these interferences?
Yes, but not ethnic interference. It is more through traditional good relations, especially with the Orthodox community, which is basically the Serb Orthodox community, where there are relations and a lot of activities, including in the media and on social media.
They [Russia] try to influence a part of Bosnia and Herzegovina, especially Banja Luka and Republika Srpska, and Dodik is somehow to act as an influencer for Russian interests. This is indeed the case. Dodik has been sitting together with [Russian president Vladimir] Putin for the 11th time since the beginning of the war in Ukraine. This is really remarkable.
How important is Bosnia and Herzegovina and Dodik for Russia and for Putin?
The economic and political-strategic importance is nearly zero. But it can be used as a way of distracting from European and somehow American activities, just by giving them a negative impact on everything. So this is more seen as a tool, rather than an area of influence.
Does the EU have a role in fighting such interference — Russian, but also the ethnic interference from Croatia and Serbia?
The ethnic relationships are within the framework of Dayton, and they are acceptable. But I think it is very important that the EU makes it clear that European integration is not based on ethnic differences, but on uniting in diversity.
This is something that is very complicated. You cannot do this only with programmes or money. I think these challenges are the typical issues that you can address through European commitment, but in the details, it has not delivered.
Unfortunately, maybe the European Union should sit down again and think about more tools and opportunities, especially addressing civil society, to give more attraction to the European idea.
How would that work?
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Student protests in France are an expression of the country’s deep political and economic crisis, says Jan Rovný, a Czech professor at Paris’s Sciences Po.
Students from elite schools and universities have joined secondary-school pupils from deprived suburbs in protesting for education reforms. Rovný explains how these young people protest in solidarity with less fortunate peers, invoking ideals of equality embedded in French minds.
He explained how traditionally violent protests in the republic are often met by disproportionately heavy-handed policing.
The French government has tried to hide students’ dissatisfaction by blaming far-left groups.
What do the protests say about French society? Are they a revolt by young people against poor conditions or part of broader woes?
It is important to realise that the situation in France does not concern only young people and education, it goes deeper than that. The era of French president Emmanuel Macron is coming to an end. For several years now, the country has been run by unstable minority governments, which all face one key problem: how to draft a budget, unveiled on October 1, and push it through parliament.
It is clear that the country is in a very difficult economic situation, because its debt stands at around 117 percent of GDP. The interest rate is rising and approaching five percent. Every day, newspapers write that France cannot bear this burden.
French society is realising that it is at an impasse both politically and economically, that the current elite has no answer, and that savings must be made in various areas. People from many sectors are now speaking out to say they do not want cuts. Or that they have problems that are not being addressed. And young people have a clear view of this, and that is why they are mobilising.
The protest began with specific demands from secondary-school pupils, who clearly identified shortcomings in education — notably missing teachers, overcrowded classrooms and schools in poor condition, some with rats running around and no running water. Yet the protest quickly grew into a nationwide movement. Why have these particular issues proved so powerful?
Partly because they underscore this whole situation, and partly because this is a young generation that represents France’s future. Young people are protesting to say: look at the future we are facing. And parents and teachers largely agree with them.
The protests began in the Paris suburb of Saint-Denis and did not arise as a result of a new government reform, but from the everyday experiences of students. What does this tell us about how young French people view the state and its ability to provide public education?
France generally has relatively low trust in political institutions. Young people tend to feel this even more strongly, because they are generally less politically engaged and therefore feel they are, in some way, discriminated against. They see the state as failing to care sufficiently for them and unable to cope.
This is compounded by the approaching elections. We know that the current government is fragile, and we also know that society, as well as the political establishment as a whole, is deeply polarised, with the extremist camps in particular set to enter the elections strengthened.
Staying with the protests, it is interesting that private secondary schools have joined state schools. On Tuesday, the French daily Le Monde showed protests outisde Paris Lycée Henri-IV attended by children from elite families – and where Macron studied. How do you explain the involvement of private schools unlikely to experience the same problems as public ones?
Exactly. That is my situation as well. I teach at a very prestigious university with a beautiful campus a short distance from the Louvre.
Yet our students are protesting. They are protesting because they recognise that French society has major inequalities affecting young people in suburbs like Saint-Denis or Val-de-Marne where conditions are worse.
Better off students are mobilising in solidarity – the concept of equality has been part of France’s political consciousness since the French Revolution. Those privately educated pupil therefore see it as their duty to join protests even though they enjoy far better conditions.
France is described as a strong state where education is regarded as a public service and a fundamental pillar of the French Republic. Could frustration over lack of basic conditions in schools be a reason for current anger?
Of course, and it has several dimensions. The French Third Republic was based on the idea that public education was the means through which modern citizens are created. State schools, established by law at the time, were seen as a fundamental pillar of the new, young democracy.
When you walk around Paris or anywhere else in France, you notice that every school has both the French and European flags above its entrance, along with the words “liberty, equality, fraternity” — the motto of the republicand revolution. Historically, schools drew children out of traditional families, which at that time were highly Catholic, and turned them into modern citizens. That is the country’s foundation.
Another factor is that the French state is very powerful: public spending accounts for more than 50% of GDP. The state is hierarchical, yet it seeks to show that it can do everything, including providing schooling for all. That position is increasingly hard to defend, particularly when money is short and public spending must be cut.
France has a long history of street protests. Is the current situation different in any way from previous social conflicts?
It is difficult to say. What is interesting is that secondary-school students are mobilising. That is relatively unusual, though not entirely unprecedented. It has happened in the past too, but was less visible. Teachers’ unions are now joining these students, as are broader trade unions and public-sector employees generally. University students are also already on strike. There is talk that farmers could join them. It may gather momentum and, as with the yellow vest protests, everyone who criticises the government may take to the streets. That is essentially the majority.
What is interesting about the current protests is that they are led by underage young people who are not yet able to vote, yet can still place the government under enormous pressure. How do you explain this?
They are young and have the time and ability to mobilise. They are able to sustain it and have their own internal organisation. Certain political forces, primarily from the far left, are helping or supporting them, but only to a limited extent. I think the protest is genuinely organic, rather than being directed by a political party or political agitators.
Young people feel they have something to say, and they can mobilise with the support of some teachers, some parents and now also broader sections of society — both university students and some trade union organisations. It may last for some time.
The French government may fear protesting young people more than other protest groups. Why do protesting young people carry such particular political weight in France?
It is probably a memory of 1968 when student mobilisation shifted the entire country to open up certain issues. Sudents are able to mobilise and persevere because they do not lose income when they strike, whereas workers who go on strike do not receive pay for those days, which can be a serious problem for some.
There is also a significance of young people being the future, who say: no, we simply want this country to be different, because it will be ours and we will be responsible for it when you are no longer here.
On Monday, a 15-year-old boy lost his hand after a police grenade exploded, with several other injuries caused by police being investigated. Could this fundamentally change the public mood?
Protests in France tend to be more violent than others are used to. I think it works both ways. I am convinced that the overwhelming majority of protesting students are peaceful, but some people with somewhat different intentions join them. They are called ‘casseurs’ (wreckers)who simply exploit the situation to throw stones at police or set bins on fire.
On the other side are the police, who can become highly aggressive quickly. There is now a major debate over whether the police response is proportionate. These responses divide the left and the right quite clearly with the government and the right wing supporting police, while the left argues that police brutality is pervasive.
It is quite shocking to see footage of armed police officers beating children in the street.
Exactly. And the police will have to be careful not to lose control of the situation. The response of the education minister, who has told students that he will listen to them, is also interesting. The interior minister and the prime minister have instead responded that the police are doing their job and that the interventions are proportionate.
The government is blaming radical left-wing groups for the violence, accusing the far-left party La France Insoumise (France Unbowed) of inciting riots. Do you find this political explanation convincing, or does it take attention away from students’ genuine demands?
It is difficult to say. I would not be at all surprised if extremist groups of any kind joined the protests, although left-wing groups are probably more likely. It is difficult to speculate on the extent to which this is directed from the leadership of France Unbowed. However, I do not think it is to any great extent.
Representatives of this left-wing party, including its MPs and local politicians, joined student, thereby legitimising these protests. But I very much doubt that the party would seek to organise greater violence in order to draw attention to the situation. That suggestion seems somewhat extreme to me.
France is only a few months away from presidential elections. Could this discontent become one of the issues in the election campaign?
Everyone is trying to gain political advantage from it in some way. It is quite clear that the typical Jean-Luc Mélenchon voter supports the students and government criticism more generally.
Ordinary citizens do not want to see violence or rubbish being set on fire, and this sentiment is probably much stronger on the right, which automatically sees Mélenchon as an instigator of unrest.
Mélenchon needs to be careful. To win a larger number of voters, he must also appear as someone who is trying to prevent violence. That is what he attempted to do. A few days ago, he addressed students, saying: mobilise, but your actions must be non-violent. He specifically added that they must be disciplined.
In your view, what could be the boiling point at which governments will no longer be able to calm the situation through promises or concessions?
That is a difficult question. These protests cannot go on forever, since many students realise what they want is better teaching conditions, so that they can prepare better for the baccalaureate examinations, which are approaching in the spring for those in their final year. So they may want to sit down and study.
If the government manages to offer at least some concrete solutions to the fundamental problems — above all, on timetables and teacher allocation on lycées — it may calm the situation. If it does not, I do not know.
Can we therefore understand the current protests as an expression of a crisis in French society, or as evidence that some form of civic mobilisation and the belief that protest can change something still function in France?
It is both. From young people’s perspective, the positive aspect is that they are able to mobilise, take their future into their own hands and say: this is a problem. We told you this, you did not listen to us, so now we are changing tactics and will protest visibly. I think that is fundamentally positive — without the violence.
On the other hand, French society is in deep crisis, and overcoming it will require an explicit change in the narrative – a change in the system. There will need to be some recognition that France is no longer what it used to be; while it remains one of the larger countries of the EU, it is now more or less an ordinary country and it must behave accordingly and see itself in that way.
Understanding this is quite difficult, and it will certainly require political courage and a political figure capable of turning frustrations into something positive.
Jan Rovný (1978) is professor of political science at the Centre for European Studies and Comparative Politics at Sciences Po university in Paris. His academic specialisms include political competition in Europe, ideological conflict and voter behaviour. He studied at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, at the the College of Europe in Bruges, and at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden.
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