In several of my previous essays, I have analyzed and commented on protests as an expression of public dissent against state policies and actions. Throughout countries that call themselves liberal democracies but are governed by politicians who are deeply unpopular because of social and economic policies incapable of dealing meaningfully with increasing economic inequality, the difficulty in finding affordable housing, good healthcare, accessible education, and the protection of Indigenous rights, the only recourse concerned citizens feel they have to show their dissatisfaction are protests and demonstrations. My research shows that the years since 2020 have been unprecedented globally in terms of the volume and scope of protests. In this wrap-up essay, I examine events in India, France, and Spain to trace the illiberal turn of liberal democracies on matters that go to the core of building equitable and inclusive communities—education, housing, and an honest democratic space.
It appears that across the liberal democratic world, a profound structural transformation is underway—one that cuts to the core of the democratic social contract. Instead of safeguarding fundamental rights, maintaining public welfare, and fostering citizen participation, states are increasingly deploying corporate, administrative, and police power to stifle any sign of popular opposition. The government response to recent social movements reveals a systemic pattern: when faced with public resistance to economic enclosure and social austerity, liberal states default to coercive law enforcement rather than political negotiation.
This crisis of governance spans both Western nations and major democracies in the Global South. From university campuses and police lines in France, to housing blockades in Spain, to mass student and citizen mobilizations across India, a generation of young people is discovering that the state has functionally abandoned its obligation to listen, negotiate, or govern in the common interest.
We are watching deeply unpopular states desperately holding on to anti-people policies to serve the interests of a small elite and using coercive action to stifle dissent. But they are failing.
Scene of crowds marching to the Supreme Court of India, New Delhi on October 12, 2026, defying heavy police clampdown. Photo by Abhinav Saha, Source: The India Cable
1. Youth as the Vanguard: Education, Rights, and the Rebranding of “Gen D”
At the vanguard of this global wave of resistance are young people—students, early-career workers, and youth organizers—who bear the heaviest burden of neoliberal restructuring, democratic erosion, and generational economic precarity.
India and the Rise of “Gen D”
In India, youth-led movements have explicitly positioned themselves against an increasingly autocratic and unresponsive political state. Rebranding Generation Z as “Gen D” (“D” for Democracy), young organizers of the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) and student organizations supporting them have transformed campus resistance into a nationwide defense of constitutional freedoms, electoral integrity, and institutional autonomy. Facing administrative disenfranchisement, targeted voter purges resulting in the disenfranchisement of some 130 million voters to the suspected advantage of Narendra Modi’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), and state-sponsored intimidation, Indian youth continue to assert their rights in public squares and university halls, refusing to let the democratic framework be hollowed out from within.
This is truly remarkable. I have written before about the emergence of the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) and its campaign for educational reform. In a bold display of political maturity, the CJP has picked a far more ambitious issue: the protection of the universal franchise, considered by a large segment of Indians to be under attack by a pliant Election Commission to ensure the re-election of the ruling BJP. It is widely believed that the Election Commission, constitutionally established to ensure free, fair, and timely elections, has colluded with the ruling party in what has become known in India as “vote theft”.
The Modi government, which controls the policing of Delhi, has responded with a show of force and tactics that surpass even what the British colonial government did in 1942 to deal with the freedom movement’s anti-colonial demonstrations. Undeterred, the CJP and its allies issued a call for public protest to demand accountability, cancellation of voter lists that excluded hundreds of millions of voters, and resignation of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar. Launched in Mumbai on October 2—Mahatma Gandhi’s birthday—the protest resumed in Delhi on October 10. The Modi government used a massive deployment of police and paramilitary forces, cancellation of internet services, suspension of metro lines and regional trains entering Delhi, and multi-layered steel barricades to prevent protesters from reaching Jantar Mantar, the historic designated protest site.
These repressive efforts failed to stop the demonstrations, which drew huge crowds and were taken up by opposition political parties led by Rahul Gandhi, Leader of the Opposition in Parliament. The protests have continued daily, undeterred by police surveillance, pre-emptive detentions, and physical force.
France and the Broken Promise of Egalité
In France—a republic fundamentally bound to the historic promise of Liberté, égalité, fraternité—state policies have severely undermined public education, reduced funding for social services, and restricted equitable access to higher learning. The crisis across French primary, secondary, and higher education is structural and acute. Public universities face severe budget deficits, overcrowded lecture halls, decaying facilities, and a desperate shortage of teaching staff, while student poverty has reached record levels.
A primary driver of youth anger is the state’s reliance on automated sorting algorithms, most notably Parcoursup, the centralized admissions platform for higher education. Designed to manage university enrollment under conditions of austerity, Parcoursup operates as an opaque screening mechanism that bottlenecks working-class and suburban youth out of sought-after academic tracks, reinforcing social stratification under the guise of meritocracy. Compounding this educational bottleneck is an escalating student living crisis. Rising food prices, inflation, and a severe shortage of affordable public housing (CROUS accommodations) have forced thousands of students to rely on food banks just to subsist while pursuing a degree.
Rather than addressing demands from student unions (UNEF, Union Étudiante, LFI-Étudiants) for a guaranteed youth autonomy income, expanded CROUS housing stock, abolition of restrictive admission quotas, and massive capital investment in public academic institutions, the French government of President Emmanuel Macron has prioritized fiscal discipline and redirected billions toward military spending and geopolitical endeavors. Recognizing that educational inequality and underfunded public infrastructure are the exact wedges through which broader social hierarchies are reinforced, high school and university students across Paris, Lyon, Marseille, and Rennes are engaging in nationwide strikes, campus occupations, and street blockades. Their movement demands that education be restored as a public good rather than managed as a stratified market commodity.
The Neoliberal Enclosure of Housing: The Spanish Front
The illiberal turn is not merely a crisis of civil rights; it is fundamentally intertwined with the protection of elite financial interests. As public assets are privatized and essential human needs are transformed into speculative financial instruments, basic goods become fierce political battlegrounds. This is best exemplified by recent events in Spain.
Faced with a devastating cost-of-living and housing crisis—where corporate real estate funds (“vulture funds”) and short-term tourist rentals have driven urban rents up dramatically while wages remain stagnant—social movements dedicated to the right to accessible and dignified housing (Sindicato de Inquilinas) launched mass public mobilizations.
In response to nationwide anger, Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’s progressive government introduced emergency decree-laws to enact rent caps, extend lease agreements, restrict speculative corporate property purchases, and suspend evictions for vulnerable tenants through 2030. However, a reactionary parliamentary majority—composed of conservative parties (PP, Vox) aligned with wealthy real estate lobbies—repeatedly voted down these protective measures in Congress. When the high-profile police eviction of an 87-year-old woman, “Maricarmen,” from her downtown Madrid home of 70 years sparked outrage in late September 2026, mass encampments erupted across Madrid’s Puerta del Sol and Barcelona’s Plaça de Catalunya.
While the executive attempted to push housing relief, the state apparatus defaulted to enforcing corporate property law. Police units were dispatched to enforce court-ordered evictions, forcing tenant organizations and neighborhood grassroots coalitions to physically blockade building entrances and doorways to protect vulnerable families from being thrown onto the streets.
2. From Dialogue to Coercion: Law Enforcement as the Default State Response
When faced with legitimate public grievance, liberal democratic governments have increasingly abdicated their primary political duty: dialogue. Rather than inviting protest leaders to the negotiating table to achieve mutually satisfactory resolutions, states now subcontract their public engagement almost entirely to law enforcement agencies.
The Delhi Paradigm and Post-Colonial Tactics
In Delhi, the state’s response to mass assembly has frequently involved militarized police cordons, pre-emptive detentions, and intrusive digital surveillance. The Delhi Police—operating under the direct administrative control of the central Ministry of Home Affairs—deployed these exact tactics during the historic Farmers’ Strike, the CJP demonstrations against national examination irregularities, and now during the October 2026 voter rights marches.
By repeatedly erecting multi-tiered concrete barriers, cutting cellular internet, blocking public transit, and violating explicit Supreme Court directives protecting the fundamental right to peaceful assembly, the government is utilizing coercive methods that mirror—and in key respects surpass—the authoritarian control tactics utilized by British colonial authorities during the 1942 Quit India movement.
Executive Overreach and Riot Policing in France
In France, executive authority is regularly deployed to bypass parliamentary debate entirely (using constitutional mechanisms like Article 49.3), leaving heavy riot police (CRS and BRAV-M motorized units) as the state’s primary interface with its citizenry. Demonstrators demanding basic investments in public institutions are routinely met with violent crowd-dispersal methods, tear gas, water cannons, mass detentions, and kettle tactics designed to intimidate rather than de-escalate.
French riot police in heavy gear confronting student demonstrators during public street protests. Source: CTV News
As academic and geopolitician Pascal Lottaz noted in his analysis of French civil unrest, these protests are no longer routine trade union marches; they reflect a deep systemic crisis. Lottaz highlights the stark contradiction within the French state: while executive leadership claims there is “an infinite chest of treasure” for external geopolitical conflicts and defense budgets, it insists there is zero money to fund public schools, universities, healthcare, or municipal infrastructure. When state authorities prioritize external projection over domestic welfare, police violence becomes the primary tool used to contain the resulting popular rage. Video evidence of French police beating captured student demonstrators underscores a state relying on raw coercion as its moral authority dissolves.
The Dual Role of Policing in Spain
The situation in Spain offers a nuanced contrast regarding how policing operates when executive and parliamentary powers conflict. Unlike India and France, where central executives actively used police forces to suppress dissent against their policies, Spain’s progressive executive government attempted to pass tenant protections and rent controls.
However, because property rights and eviction orders remain codified under existing judicial and civil frameworks, the coercive apparatus of the state (Policía Nacional and municipal police) continues to operate as an enforcement tool for real estate owners and court-ordered evictions. Even under a government attempting to legislate housing relief, police forces were mobilized to break up tenant blockades, clear encampments in Madrid’s Puerta del Sol, and arrest housing activists. This demonstrates that within neoliberal liberal democracies, the judicial-policing machinery is structurally programmed to enforce capital enclosure and private property rights, regardless of political rhetoric or executive intent.
3. The Global Pattern: Neoliberal Ideology and Capital Consolidation
The common thread uniting these disparate geographic contexts is a dominant neoliberal ideology that prioritizes the pocketbooks of a super-rich elite over the collective welfare of the people.
In essence, neoliberal ideology prioritizes capital growth and elite accumulation over values of social justice, equality, accessibility, and high-quality social services. The inevitable consequence is a policy of permanent austerity and enclosure, characterized by the systematic underfunding of public goods like education, housing, and healthcare. Faced with an uncaring, unresponsive, and unrepresentative state, citizens are left with no option but to take to the streets to express their opposition to anti-people policies. In country after country that calls itself democratic, the years since 2020 have seen an unprecedented rise in protests as the centerpiece of popular resistance. Young people, organized labor, tenant unions, and farmers have spear-headed these movements.
States, captive to an ideology that favors the wealthy, have failed time after time to engage in dialogue and negotiation to address public grievances. Instead, in clear displays of illiberalism, they resort to coercion, heavy policing, intimidation, and the criminalization of dissent. When public budgets are starved to serve market imperatives, public anger is inevitable. Because governments operating under neoliberal constraints refuse to alter their fiscal priorities, their only remaining mechanism to maintain social order is suppression.
Conclusion: Reclaiming the Essence of Democracy
The global resurgence of public protest between 2020 and 2026 demonstrates that despite militarized policing, legislative enclosures, and state intimidation, citizens remain undeterred. Political leaders may have lost their moral and political authority, but the public has not lost its resolve. By raising a resounding “NO” to anti-people policies, the youth and working citizens of India, France, Spain, and beyond are practicing the true essence of democracy—reminding the world that democratic rights were never granted from above by benign authorities, but fought for, won, and preserved from below.
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