Gen Z regelt: German youth takes up the rallying cry of French high-school students

According to Courrier international, the mobilisation of French lycée students is inspiring imitators in Germany. The Gen Z regelt movement, which might be translated as "Gen Z takes matters into its own hands", is calling for a demonstration on 31 October. It demands more resources for education, health and the environment, and is highly critical of any possible compulsory conscription. That much is what the report establishes. It says nothing, for now, about the expected scale, the cities involved or how the movement is organised. The rest is our reading.

What strikes first is the circulation. A rallying cry born in French lycées crosses the Rhine without passing through a congress, a motion or a secretariat. No central committee imports it: young people watching the young people next door and thinking it could be done at home too. We would be wrong to scoff. This is how movements that outgrow their initiators begin.

The linking of school, hospital and climate is equally telling. These young people are not asking for a sectoral reform; they are pointing, without putting it in these terms, to a single trade-off. The money exists for rearmament, but it is missing for classrooms, emergency wards and the ecological transition. Opposition to conscription is therefore not a side issue: it is the other face of the same budget. Militarism demands young bodies, and these are precisely the people denied the means to learn and to be cared for.

Then comes the awkward question: can a movement without a leader and without an apparatus become anything more than a loose alliance of outrage? Luxemburg distrusted strikes decreed from above: an action born solely of discipline and enthusiasm, she wrote, remains at best an episode, a symptom of combative mood (our translation, Grève de masse, parti et syndicats). The corollary is more encouraging for our lycée students: what arises from below, from lived situations, has a chance of becoming a school. One learns by walking.

But a school is not a diploma. A day of demonstration, however massive, does not yet tell us who decides, who is accountable, or how one sustains oneself over time. And the risk is well known: the demands are broad enough that any government can promise a commission, a fund or a consultation. The reading grid is simple: does a measure increase the strength and confidence of those mobilising, or does it demobilise them? A reform wrested from power that sends everyone back home is not a victory; it is management.

We do not yet know whether Gen Z regelt will manage to build its assemblies, its links with wage earners, its habits of collective decision-making. Yet that is where everything is decided. Taking matters into your own hands is a fine verb; you still have to decide together what to do with them, before others do it on your behalf.