Youth Protests Sweep Globe as Demographic Shift Changes Political Landscape

PARIS: High schoolers who have protested for weeks in France about underfunded schools and uncertain futures complain that it's a frustrating struggle to make themselves heard. Demographically, it is true that young people in aging societies — which include France but also the United States and others — no longer have the same weight of numbers that helped their parents and grandparents make their mark when they were young. In France, protesting pupils have managed to spark a national conversation about funding for schools that has morphed into broader unrest over cost-of-living struggles and heavy-handed policing. In Serbia, two years of the Balkan country's populist strongman, Aleksandar Vucic, this weekend. In Albania, high schoolers and university students are swelling the ranks of an anti-government movement that for months has pressured Prime Minister Edi Rama to resign. Gen Z is also mobilizing in India, Nepal and elsewhere. "We're seeing youth rising all over the world," Greta Thunberg, 23, said when she popped up at a school protest in the Paris suburb of Seine-Saint-Denis. "These movements are inspired by each other. People forget how connected Gen Z are across continents," she said. But in France, Serbia and elsewhere, young people are also losing ground demographically to generations above them that are living longer and now outnumber them. When they march, wave placards and shout slogans, the voice of young people isn't — at least mathematically — as dominant as it used to be.