watched yesterday’s episode of the prominent German talk show Markus Lanz, which focused on the current protests across major French cities. There, young people—many from migrant backgrounds—are taking to the streets to protest budget cuts, institutional humiliation, and state arbitrariness.
Yet the consensus among the studio guests painted a completely different picture: the protesters were dismissed as "left-wing radicals" and "uneducated classes" from cultural backgrounds supposedly incompatible with Western democracy and unwilling to integrate into the rule of law. Lanz immediately drew a parallel to Berlin, claiming young protesters there merely use Gaza as a pretext to indulge in sheer violence, destruction, and an adrenaline rush.
This represents a perilous shift in public discourse. Subliminally, it pushes the narrative that people from non-Western backgrounds possess an almost innate, cultural, or genetic predisposition toward violence. Nobody says it outright, yet that is the unmistakable subtext. Long-standing public broadcasting institutions like Markus Lanz are drifting ever further from the lived reality of ordinary people. Sitting in designer suits paid for by public license fees, pundits engage in cheap populism at the expense of those who have no lobby.
What is really driving these uprisings? They are a reaction against a much deeper, subtle neoliberal violence. The capitalist exploitation machine doesn't physically beat people up—its violence operates through permanent, underlying suppression, exclusion, and the marginalization of growing segments of society.
As psychology proves, human beings experience happiness and the ideal state of flow when they find space to apply their talents meaningfully. Yet our current economic system denies more and more young people the basic conditions to thrive. When people barely have enough to survive and see no future for themselves—much like in Les Misérables prior to the French Revolution—going to the barricades feels like the only remaining option.
The complete erasure of concepts like exploitation and classism from these broadcasts—in order to absolve Western capitalism of any blame—is a catastrophic failure by public broadcasters like ZDF and ARD (which similarly platforms right-leaning populists like Dieter Nuhr). Public broadcasting indeed needs a radical overhaul, though in the exact opposite direction of what the far-right AfD demands: we need to move away from out-of-touch boomer talk shows flirting with right-wing populism, and create progressive spaces where the genuine fears, struggles, and realities of Gen Z and Gen Alpha finally matter.
