The Geography of Protest: A Southern European Perspective

Following the events in Paris, I paused to provocatively ask myself why the wave of protests interesting Europe today did not rise across Northern European cities, why Copenhagen, Amsterdam or Berlin were not making the headlines the same way Rome, Lisbon and Athens were. 

This question is less about finding ultimate answers, and more about doing geography, namely shedding a light on how the dynamics between the Northern and Southern European region have never been neutral, as much as the geography of today’s protests isn’t.

While France has emerged as one of the epicentres of Europe’s latest wave of demonstrations, the geography of mobilisation is showing a particular echo rising across Southern Europe and the Balkans. 

On 17 October alone, French authorities counted approximately 550,000 demonstrators nationwide, including 110,000 in Paris. Yet some of the largest demonstrations elsewhere on the continent have taken place further south, with more than 100,000 protesters gathered in Rome, 70,000 participants at a housing demonstration in Madrid and approximately 150,000 demonstrators in Belgrade.

According to an investigation published by El País on 24 October, at least 177 protests took place across 12 European countries between 15 September and 23 October, with France, Spain, Italy, Portugal and Belgium accounting for approximately 80% of recorded events.

When I watch footage of young students, farm workers, teachers, doctors and members of the civil society in Milan, Rome, Porto, Lisbon, Madrid and Athens, I don’t see a series of coincidental connections between their contexts, but a broader, far more complex and interconnected pattern of historical, economic and political dynamics that have shaped Southern Europe over the last decades.

As a Southern European myself, looking into the mobilisations across the region, I felt compelled to explore what makes these protests particularly significant in the context of the region's history of the past twenty years. Is Southern Europe playing a distinctive role in the current wave of mobilisation, and if so, why? And what might today's protests surface about the region's relationship with Northwestern Europe, and the imbalanced ways in which economic crises, opportunities and political power have been played out across geographical axes?

A history of North-South power imbalances

A key to understanding today’s mobilisations across Southern Europe lies in how the Eurozone debt crisis unfolded between 2010 and 2012, and the evolving political and economic relationship between Southern and Northwestern Europe.

While the relationship has evolved over time, the North-South European geopolitical axis has consistently been defined by power asymmetries. These have marked a feature of Europe's political and economic landscape, shaping not only the course of economic development, but consequentially how opportunities were and continue to be distributed, and which communities paid the highest price when crises unfolded. 

For decades, Southern Europe has faced challenges in its economic development, often under the pressure of fiscal rules, debt targets and economic adjustment requirements set by EU institutions and Northern countries. The creditor-debitor relationship, an underlying scheme in the North-South axis, defined hierarchies of decision-making power, particularly around which standards EU countries must abide with, and which countries had to adjust and keep up. This led to positioning Southern Europe as a context of persistent economic vulnerabilities and uneven capacities to absorb financial shocks with crises compounding over time, leaving countries struggling to find a stable recovery in between one and then another period of instability.

This context was subject to a significant “pressure test” with the Great Recession in 2008. As the Eurozone debt crisis shook the EU, the political responses between 2010 and 2012 widened the North-South power imbalances and brought inequalities into greater focus.

With fiscal discipline, debt reduction and structural reforms taking priority, the measures adopted came at a greater social cost for Greece, Portugal, Italy and Spain, through strict austerity programmes and fiscal tightening and labour-market reforms that resulted, both at a national and regional level, in cuts to public spending, wage freezes and reductions, pressure on pensions and healthcare systems, and spiking unemployment. 

These measures completely reshaped the region’s economic, social, and political landscape, with consequences that reverberate today. 

While the years between 2013 and 2020 brought signs of economic rebound, recovery has shown uneven trajectories across Southern European countries, leaving much of Southern Europe vulnerable to the effects of the pandemic and the following period of crises, with many of the structural inequalities and economic pressures still unresolved. 

Today, as we witness large-scale, poly-crises impact economies and social structures across the world, challenging stability of those European countries long perceived as economically unshakable since the Second World War, it would be unfair to state that Southern Europe was met with the 2020-2026 multiple shocks within the same economic, social structure and national welfare conditions as the Northwestern Europe. 

And this is perhaps what makes the meaning of today’s protests across Southern Europe much more layered.

When watching people taking to the streets in Rome, Lisbon, Athens and Madrid, we are witnessing a collective act of resistance against not only today’s challenges, but against a larger pot of compounded grievances from two decades of instability, uneven recoveries, austerity measures, and deepening divides within the North-South axis.

Global shocks, local (uneven) preparedness

From the COVID-19 pandemic and its economic effects to the large-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, escalating conflicts in the Middle East, inflation, rising living costs and growing geopolitical uncertainty, recent global events added new layers of pressure on existing challenges.

By the time the pandemic hit, much of Southern Europe was still grappling with difficult, and uneven recovery pathways. 

While international bailouts in Greece formally ended in 2018, this process did little to de-escalate the social consequences of a decade of austerity: unemployment remained high, wages had only begun to recover, and many households continued to struggle financially. Portugal, meanwhile, was showing early signs of economic rebound, yet low wages, insecure employment and growing housing pressures persisted. Italy entered its third recession in a decade in 2018, with its economy still below pre-2008 levels and longstanding inequalities continuing to shape people's quality of life.

When global crises unfolded in 2020, Southern European was far from stable and thriving. 

Surely, many challenges faced by Southern Europe have been shared with Northwestern countries. Inflation and rising living costs, housing crises and gentrification, precarious employment, investment-led development, and climate risks have made it to the headlines from Berlin to Athens, Amsterdam to Barcelona. Yet data offers a less homogenous picture of how these pressures played out across geographies in Europe.

(*) When looking at Italy, average real annual wages declined by approximately 5%  between 2005 and 2025. Meanwhile, the inflation of recent years has pushed everyday expenses considerably higher: by September 2026, food prices were more than 28% above their 2021 average, while overall consumer prices had risen by nearly 23%. As of October 2026, the latest OECD estimate puts the average gross salary of a full-time-equivalent employee in Italy at €34,733 per year (2025). 

Average residential property prices reached approximately €2,217 per square metre in September 2026, marking a 4.9% increase compared with the previous year, with national averages concealing significant differences between cities: from €5,665 per square metre in Milan, €3,875 in Rome to €2,706 in Cagliari. Against an average gross annual salary of approximately €34,700, even an 80-square-metre home at the national average price would be equivalent to 5.1 years of average gross earnings.

Compared to Germany, where average real annual wages increased by approximately 17.4% between 2005 and 2025 (against Italy’s 5.1% decline over the same period), the countries show a divergence of 22.5 percentage points. While inflation also significantly affected Germany, with food and non-alcoholic beverage prices rising by approximately 32% between 2021 and 2025, German workers entered this period with a different record of wage growth and average earnings. According to the latest OECD figures, Germany's average gross annual salary was €54,840 in 2025, a figure that sets, on average, a different capacity to absorb inflationary shock.

As for the housing market, in 2026, average residential property prices stood at approximately €3,166 per square metre in Germany, around 43% higher than Italy's €2,217. Yet average gross annual wages in Germany were nearly 58% higher than in Italy in 2025. This means that, despite lower property prices in absolute terms, Italian workers faced a greater housing purchase cost relative to average gross earnings.

The touristification and gentrification of cities such as Barcelona, Lisbon, Palermo, Porto and Madrid are distinctive factors in the Southern European landscape. Over the past decade, and particularly within the pandemic, Mediterranean cities have become increasingly attractive destinations to tourists, international investors, digital nomads and professionals from Northern Europe and North America, with foreign wages and therefore purchasing power notably higher than those of local residents. The case of Portugal is an example of how governments actively encouraged these movements through favourable tax regimes, residency programmes and policies designed to attract foreign capital, reshaping local housing markets, and widening the gap between international purchasing power and local wages. 

In Lisbon, rents on new residential leases reached €17.43 per square metre by mid-2026. In Barcelona, average rents have increased by more than 50% over the past decade, while the city counted over 10,600 licensed tourist apartments by the end of 2025. Even Palermo, whose housing market remains less expensive, has recorded a growing footprint of tourism with more than 7,000 active short-term rental listings counted in September 2026, while advertised rents in its historic centre exceeded the citywide average.

Climate change is another differentiator. While extreme weather is increasingly affecting the entire continent, the Mediterranean faces a dangerous combination of rising temperatures, prolonged droughts, water scarcity and wildfires, threatening agriculture, tourism and outdoor livelihoods. In the summer of 2024, southeastern Europe experienced a record 66 days of strong heat stress, more than twice its historical average. 

(**) The economic dimension is worth mentioning. Between 1980 and 2024, Italy recorded approximately €145 billion in weather- and climate-related economic losses, more than fifteen times Denmark's €9.3 billion. Yet a key disparity emerges in financial protection: while 61% of Denmark's recorded losses and 31% of Germany's were insured, the figure stood at just 4% in Italy. According to the European Environment Agency, Southern Europe is among the continent's most vulnerable regions to overlapping climate risks, particularly extreme heat, drought, wildfires and water scarcity, but despite the risk, countries like Italy and Spain recording amongst the highest values in total economic losses only record respectively 4% and 12% in share of insured losses insured while Denmark, accounting for some of the lowest economic loss in Europe, shows a 61% in share of insured losses.

A legacy of unequal development

In Calabria (Italy), the farmworker delivering vegetables that feed Italy and much of Europe can barely make a living from his own labour: precarious contractual conditions and rising costs of petrol are making his livelihood at risk.

In Milan, a second-generation migrant graduate struggles to imagine a future in a country that denies her citizenship despite being born and raised there, while the chronically underfunded public school she attends struggles to provide the opportunities she is meant to get, and the only working prospect she can rely on is a 350 EUR/month traineeship experience.

In Porto, a 70-year-old pensioner camps outside a public building, unable to keep up with rents increasingly disconnected from local incomes, in a city whose housing market has been reshaped by tourism and international investment.

In Madrid, a neighbourhood rallies around an 87-year-old woman who faced eviction, refusing to accept that the interests of real estate investment funds should matter more than those of communities that have called these streets home for generations.

These struggles draw a picture of political and economic developments rooted in uneven conditions. And it’s only by looking into the specific context of the countries and their drives to protest that the different, rather unequal, grounds across European geography can be captured.

Many Northwestern European countries, such as France, Belgium, Germany, are experiencing the effects of austerity more closely, in response to how, today, global economic constraints are coming to threaten their domestic structures. They are too, today, taking to the streets to reject proposed reforms that would affect social protection systems long established. From changes to existing pension schemes, unemployment benefits to public spending, Northwestern countries are defending the rights for their existing social security and long lasted structures for stability to remain in place.

This route has been already and long walked, endured and advocated by Southern European countries.

There, today's protests carry a deeper weight, unfolding against a layered history of economic insecurity, austerity and crises whose consequences have accumulated over the past two decades. Protesters’ demands go beyond one reform, one change in welfare benefit, one round of cuts.

The drive for change in Southern Europe has the (exhausted) face of generation after generation carrying the legacy of systemic inequalities, and the burden of economic growth pressures from across other angles of European decision power sites.

Their hopes eroded from too many struggles piling up over time, and little to no certainty about what will fuel hope in the immediate horizon, perhaps these days at least anchoring in the power of those courageously showing up collectively to demand better.

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Notes on Data & Sources

(*) Wage figures are drawn from the OECD's Average Annual Wages dataset, which measures gross annual earnings on a full-time-equivalent basis. Changes in real wages between 2005 and 2025 were calculated using the OECD's inflation-adjusted series expressed in constant 2025 euros, with percentage changes calculated as (2025 value ÷ 2005 value − 1) × 100. The 22.5-percentage-point difference represents the gap between Germany's and Italy's real wage growth over this period.

Residential property prices refer to average advertised sale prices per square metre, rather than completed transactions. Italian figures are sourced from Immobiliare.it's September 2026 market data; German figures are attributed to Immowelt and should be checked against the corresponding reporting period. Housing purchase costs relative to wages were estimated by multiplying the advertised price per square metre by an illustrative property size of 80 m², then dividing by the OECD's 2025 average gross annual wage. These comparisons are illustrative and exclude taxes, mortgage interest, transaction costs and regional differences. They do not account for disposable household income, income distribution or differences in national purchasing power. Consumer-price changes are calculated by comparing the relevant national price indices across the specified periods, rather than adding annual inflation rates together.

(**) Economic-loss estimates are based on the European Environment Agency's dataset covering weather- and climate-related extreme events between 1980 and 2024, expressed in constant 2024 euros. The figures include estimated direct economic losses from events such as floods, storms, heatwaves, droughts and wildfires. Insurance percentages represent the share of recorded economic losses covered by private insurance. Absolute country totals are influenced by population, economic size, the value of exposed assets and the incidence of extreme events; they should not be interpreted as direct measures of relative climate vulnerability or losses attributable exclusively to human-caused climate change.