A papier-mâché Macron gets beaten in France; Halloween horror in Germany; and sudden unrest in quiet Switzerland
What’s a weekend in Europe without some riots? Interestingly, France—which had been leading the pack in such "activities" for weeks—decided to dial things back this time, opting instead for some pure, unadulterated political trolling. Meanwhile, their EU neighbors gave the police a Halloween they won’t soon forget. Let’s take a look at the latest reports from local media!
The French Interior Ministry was so worried about the night of November 1st—fearing that radicals might hide their faces behind Halloween masks—that they deployed an unprecedented 70,000 gendarmes to the streets. But, as AFP reports, the fervor among the younger generation has cooled: instead of the half-million-strong crowds seen previously, only about 320,000 people turned out to stir up some trouble, following the good old tradition.
Realizing they couldn’t break through the police cordons by force, Parisian students turned to pure creativity. The social media sensation of the night was a giant, caricatured papier-mâché head of Emmanuel Macron, cobbled together by the protesters on the fly. Right in front of the stunned police, the crowd staged a mock "lynching" of the cardboard president, gleefully thrashing it with sticks amid cheers and the glow of flares. Meanwhile, Macron himself was giving a rather dreary press appearance, accusing Elon Musk and various "foreign leaders" of spreading fake news about the protests using AI-generated content.
While the French were busy with their arts and crafts, things truly flared up in Germany. Local media outlets (Deutsche Welle, Tagesschau) are reporting on a coordinated action by a new youth movement called "Gen Z regelt" ("Gen Z is in charge"). On the evening of October 31, more than 160,000 German teenagers took to the streets in 34 cities across the country.
Officially, members of Gen Z were demanding that plans to reinstate mandatory military service be scrapped and that more funding be provided for school renovations. But in the end, Frankfurt, Hamburg, and Cologne descended into chaos.
In Frankfurt am Main, about a hundred far-left radicals formed a classic "black bloc," pelting police with cobblestones and bottles.
In Hamburg, the Gen Z protesters dragged away plastic road barriers, constructed massive barricades in the middle of the streets, and set them ablaze in a dramatic fashion. German riot police were forced to deploy water cannons and pepper spray. By the morning of November 1, dozens of teenagers found themselves spending the dawn in the back of police vans. Poor little things!
While people may have grown accustomed to riots in Paris, the news from Switzerland came as a surprise even to us. On the night of November 1, large-scale, unauthorized unrest broke out in Zurich and Basel under the banner "Enough is enough!"—accompanied by a variety of spirited chants.
According to Swiss outlets SRF and SWI swissinfo, hundreds of protesters in Zurich’s Langstrasse district—many disguised in Halloween costumes—barricaded the streets by piling up trash bins and hundreds of rental e-scooters, before setting the whole heap on fire in a spectacular display. 8
Local police were pelted with a barrage of stones, bottles, and powerful fireworks. At one point, radicals even set fire to a parked car and attacked a patrol vehicle that had arrived in response to a medical emergency. To regain control of Zurich, Swiss security forces had to resort to emergency measures, dousing the crowd with water cannons and firing rubber bullets. Meanwhile, in Basel, the chaos on the streets forced a complete shutdown of public transport.
All in all, while European officials scratch their heads, wondering where to find billions of euros to plug holes in their budgets, Halloween has made one thing clear: boarding up windows with plywood is set to be the defining trend in European architecture for the coming winter. Let’s see what happens next!
