Moroccan youth have spontaneously come up with a slogan to claim that they’re being taken seriously, and with great success: GenZ 212, combining the definition of an age group with the country’s telephone code.
Can we imagine French youth doing the same, and soon creating a movement called GenZ 33?
I’m talking about French people aged between 15 and 30 in 2025. They represent around 12 million people, or just under a fifth of the country’s population. Even if it’s unrealistic to make generalizations, due in particular to differences in social background, they are much more likely than their predecessors to have graduated from higher education. Many more also live in cities or suburbs. Far fewer come from rural or working-class backgrounds. Much more culturally diverse. Their way of working, consuming, traveling and getting information differs from that of previous generations. They are often perceived as more creative, committed, attentive to social and environmental issues, and sensitive to the values of transparency and authenticity. They want a successful, happy, free personal life, far removed from the taboos and stable, conformist models of private life and professional careers imposed on them by their parents.
In theory, much broader perspectives are opening up to them: they’ve grown up with the Internet, smartphones and social networks. They have access to digital and physical tools unimaginable twenty years ago; to instant information on every subject. They know that there are immense waves of technological progress ahead of them in every field that will turn their lives upside down. They can learn anything and everything for free. They have far greater access to foreign cultures, unrivalled travel opportunities and much lower travel costs, leading to greater tolerance of differences in identity. In particular, young women have an infinitely freer and more promising future than their mothers.
And yet, despite this much earlier maturity, and regardless of their parents’ status and social class, they are collectively the big losers of the future; because the world their elders are preparing for them is far less attractive than the one their parents had and could hope for at the same age. They have far fewer prospects of changing their social environment; they are less likely to own a home before the age of 40 (their parents could buy their first home with less than 5 years’ savings, whereas GenZ 33 can only hope for a much smaller one, which also necessarily reduces their desire to have children). Caught in the black box of Parcours Sup, with its increasingly stringent requirements, their university orientation has been much more difficult than that of their parents; the jobs on offer to them are much less stable; and even if the CDI still exists, the beginnings of their careers are much more often marked by sandwich courses, fixed-term contracts, temporary work, or short assignments, in a much more competitive professional world, with a much broader demand for skills and teachings that are much more rapidly obsolete. Finally, social inequalities weigh on them even more than on their parents.
Their more distant future is even less promising: their pensions are no longer financed; they inherit a public debt of unimaginable proportions, accumulated to finance their parents’ welfare. They know that they will bear the full brunt of climate change, loss of biodiversity, pollution, industrialized food, malaise and urban disorder. They also know that a more than worrying global geopolitical situation awaits them. No wonder far more of them suffer from fragile mental health and lose themselves in natural, chemical or virtual drugs than in previous generations.
In today’s France, as summarized by the lamentable budget debate currently taking place in Parliament, GenZ 33 are the big losers. While elected representatives of all stripes are doing their utmost to maintain the living conditions of all pensioners, most of whom are legitimately on welfare, nothing is being done for Gen Z and even less for the next generations: Not delaying the retirement age as the population ages is not “stealing three years of life from sixty-year-olds”, as the Senate put it, it’s extorting much more life time from younger people, who will be working to pay for these pensions, to the detriment of their own lives and those of their children. And GenZ 33 can see that this budget makes no serious provision for investment in their ecological, educational, scientific or social future. And even less to give them each a credible hope of progressing socially, economically and culturally.
How can young people, who are freer, more competent and empowered than their elders, accept being sidelined from the definition of their own future? Why do they allow themselves to be represented by people and parties who have nothing to do with their future (even when they are of the same generation as they are)? Probably because, in the individualistic logic of this generation, most members of Gen Z 33 seek to find their own place, without thinking of acting together, thus playing into the hands of previous generations and the protection of their privileges.
If collective egoism characterized previous generations, it’s individualism that threatens to lose the youngest. Yet this is in no-one’s interest: if the people of GenZ 33 flee the world we’ve left them, the pensions of their elders won’t be financed. So it’s in everyone’s interest to ensure each other’s well-being.
And it’s those countries where Gen Z is the most vocal that have the best future.