Stores looted in German riots as Gen Z activists protest living costs, military service

Rioters looted stores and set fires to barricades in Frankfurt on Saturday as protests across Germany demanded lower living costs and better education.

Tens of thousands of people across more than 30 cities took to the streets, including in the capital Berlin and financial hub Frankfurt, in protests organized by the campaign group Gen Z regelt (Gen Z takes charge).

The activists demand spending on schools, climate protection and housing, and are against plans to return to mandatory military service.

But the largely peaceful protests, which coincided with Halloween and came weeks after some of the worst rioting in decades erupted in neighboring France, turned violent in some areas.

“In ⁠the city centre, windows have been smashed at several shops,” Frankfurt police said on X. “Molotov cocktails are also being thrown at the emergency services. We urge all bystanders to avoid the ​city center or to leave the area.”

In Hamburg, some barricades were set on fire. Some businesses had boarded up their windows and doors in preparation for the protests.

“We are here today to fight for peace and freedom, rather than for war and coercion,” Gen Z regelt spokesperson Lina ​Friedrich said in Berlin on Saturday. “What matters most to us is better support for the health and education systems. We are against compulsory military service and we ​are in favor of a fairer distribution of the burden.”

Official numbers Saturday afternoon suggested turnout was below the 182,000 participants that organizers initially expected.

The protests took place alongside many others in Europe.

France, Italy, Serbia and Spain have seen protests against the cost of living, among other causes. In France, student protests about the state of education last month evolved into wider demonstrations about the cost of living and social security.

As the demonstrations began Saturday afternoon in Paris, protesters were pictured holding a banner that read: “We do not need tear gas for our future to be blurry.”

Videos vetted by NBC News show large crowds and fires burning in Marseille.

Roman Poseck, interior minister for the state of Hesse, which includes Frankfurt, warned Germans against using protests in France as an example ahead of Saturday’s protests.

“We all have those images from France in our minds — looting, burning houses, burning police vehicles, and attacks on police officers,” he said. “France must not be held up as a model in this regard.”

France’s Interior Ministry said turnout stood at 320,000 on Saturday.

In Italy, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s far-right government also said it would deploy 500 army troops alongside the police in Milan until the end of the year after groups of masked protesters looted stores in the fashion capital and elsewhere and threw projectiles at police earlier this month.

Tens of thousands of people again took to the streets of Rome on Friday and other cities and towns across the country.

The demonstrations were largely peaceful, but an NBC News crew saw police use a water cannon on protesters and groups of police charging to disperse protesters.

In Serbia, student-led activism also helped unseat the country’s long-time leader at the ballot box.

Meanwhile, police in Portugal early Sunday forcibly cleared a tent camp set up in Lisbon by activists protesting against high housing costs.

Hundreds of protesters shielding the tent camp were dispersed by police using shields and some baton charges, the Reuters news agency reported.

While the protests across the continent have drawn comparisons for their timing, Andrew Barclay, a politics lecturer at the University of Sheffield, said it was important to focus on their differences.

The French protests have involved “hundreds of thousands taking to the streets over many weeks, and at least initially centered on specific grievances about education funding,” he told NBC News.

While protests elsewhere may have taken inspiration form the French, he said, “their scale so far hasn’t been as large, and whilst the state of education continues to be a common theme, the issues being protested has ballooned to include a much larger number of complaints.”

Similarly, Barclay said the protests in Germany and France were unlikely to lead to a direct change in governance as they did in Serbia.

“Often protests, even quite large ones, don’t capture that level of support elsewhere in the country,” he said. “I would be very cautious about comparing what we have seen in Serbia, where students and others have organized to oppose state corruption, to the sorts of protests that we are seeing elsewhere.”