Europe's Street Pays for the Iran War, Russian Gas Cashes In

By Reuters' reckoning, the crowds that day surpassed the peak of the Yellow Vests. On the same Saturday, police turned water cannon on young protesters in Brussels and Liège, Milan's rioters built barricades out of café tables and set them alight, and tens of thousands marched through Lisbon before pitching tents in the middle of Rossio Square.

Now picture a second news feed running alongside the first. That same week, Donald Trump signed an executive order waiving part of the Russia sanctions mandated under the so-called Graham Act. And on that same October 17, The New York Times reported that the administration was urging Europe to resume buying Russian gas, with Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff working on a long-term plan to restore the flows.

One coincidence can be filed under chance. But when the streets of several European countries erupt over the cost of living at the very moment Washington offers a cure for that cost delivered through a Russian pipeline, the question asks itself. Who is paying for this crisis, and who stands to collect?

It is worth being clear about what this essay does not attempt. It does not hunt for an organizer, and it accuses no one. Whether a hidden hand stands behind the protests is a matter for intelligence services and courts. The analyst's task is narrower, though no less important: to show that the protests have a purpose and a beneficiary, and that both are visible in the public record, without recourse to a single leak.

A Bill Drawn Up in February

To see who is paying, one has to start not in September but on February 28. That day the United States and Israel struck Iran. The consequence was a crisis in the Strait of Hormuz, the chokepoint for a large share of the world's oil and liquefied natural gas. Energy prices took off, and Europe, which had only just weaned itself off Russian gas, found itself back in an energy trap.

The damage can be measured. In May the European Commission, as Euronews reported, raised its inflation forecast for the EU to 3.1%, a full percentage point above its pre-crisis expectation. Put simply, every hundred euros in a European wallet now loses noticeably more of its value over the year than anyone had planned for. Consumer confidence sank to a 40-month low as households braced for dearer heating and fuel and began cutting back.

But the more consequential effect was elsewhere. Expensive energy hits not only household budgets but national ones. According to Commission forecasts, France and Belgium are running deficits above 5% of GDP this year, and Austria above 4%. EU rules treat 3% as the ceiling, which places all three in the zone where Brussels demands austerity. France, on top of that, is borrowing at its highest cost in more than two decades. A state that pays more on its debt while collecting less from a slowing economy cuts spending, and the easiest place to cut is where the damage shows up last: education.

That is precisely where the fire started. In mid-September, pupils at a lycée in Créteil, in the Paris suburbs, walked out over crumbling buildings, overcrowded classrooms and teachers who were never replaced. Within weeks the movement had spread nationwide. Tellingly, the spark in neighboring Belgium was the same. Patching its budget, the government of the French-speaking community raised tuition for most students from 835 to 1,194 euros a year, and Liège became a second Créteil.

The chain, then, runs as follows: the strike on Iran, the energy shock, inflation, the budget hole, the school cuts, the protest. None of its links is hidden; each is documented. And it begins with a decision taken in Washington.

A Street Without a Headquarters

The second thing that stands out is how this wave is built. It bears little resemblance to the classic European protest, in which a union sets the date, prints the leaflets and leads the column.

No union chose the date of the decisive day, October 17. It was proposed on TikTok on September 7 by an account called "V2," run by an unknown young man. His reasoning was mundane: a Saturday at the start of the autumn school break, so that everyone could come. He was calling for a protest against fuel prices. He then declined to organize anything at all, but by then the date had a life of its own. Data from the monitoring firm Visibrain, cited by La Clé Publique, show some 460,000 posts about October 17 appearing online from September 27 onward, with TikTok videos mentioning the date drawing 132 million views. On the eve of the day, a participatory online map listed about 1,500 planned actions; the Interior Ministry had expected around 500.

One more detail shows how far the nature of protest has shifted. In December 2018, lycée students joined the Yellow Vests at the height of that movement. This time the order was reversed: Yellow Vest veterans such as Maxime Nicolle and Jérôme Rodrigues gradually fell in behind a date the young had chosen.

When the authorities shut hundreds of lycées and moved classes online, the students invented the "e-blockade," flooding the links to virtual lessons to make them impossible to hold. OSINT analysts noted another telling feature: in the Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur region, roughly 15 pivotal accounts pushed individual clips to as many as 1.4 million interactions. That is the reach of a large organized campaign, yet no organization is visible behind it. The state answered with mass detentions: by October 8, police had taken 6,877 people into custody, 86% of them minors.

The more important point, though, is that the protest has two layers, and they are drifting apart. The first is the peaceful mass of pupils, teachers, parents and unions. The second is a violent fringe that grows older almost by the week. On October 17, Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez stated that the overwhelming majority of those detained were adults, and drew the conclusion himself: this is no longer the lycée movement. In Liège, the share of minors among those arrested fell from 70% to 50% even before mid-October, and local police spoke of "profiles that have nothing to do with the pupils."

The geography of the wave is just as revealing. Its core is France and French-speaking Belgium. In the south, in Spain and Portugal, the grievance is distinct: housing and wages. Italy is imitating openly, with pupils occupying schools under the slogan "Let's do as in France." Austria is protesting over its university budget, and the Balkans are following scripts of their own. Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary and Romania, meanwhile, saw no mass protests at all in these weeks.

Viginum, the French agency that tracks foreign digital interference, found no significant foreign operation behind the spread of the October 17 call. The OSINT analysts put it succinctly: the mobilization was not engineered from abroad, it was "captured and prolonged." That distinction deserves attention. To capture is not to create, but it is not to look away either.

Who Picks Up the Footage

So let us look at who did the capturing.

Tehran was the least subtle. On October 6, Iran summoned the French ambassador over "violence" against pupils; the next day France summoned Iran's envoy in return over disinformation spread by official accounts of the Iranian foreign ministry. On October 10, students picketed the French embassy in Tehran. The irony hardly needs stating: in January Iran crushed its own protests, and by the authorities' own count more than 3,000 people died.

The Russian segment worked with a finer brush. Networks linked to Russia circulated footage of the protests widely. NewsGuard found that some of it was recycled from the 2023 pension protests and passed off as current. Another video showed dozens of Black men advancing on police at Paris's Gare du Nord, captioned as "Africans" at the school protests. It was first broadcast by RT and travelled among audiences hostile to immigration.

The American right offered its own reading. On October 16, FrontPage Mag argued that the student riots in France, Albania and India were the "USAID effect," the work of a leftist NGO apparatus. The Indian right-wing outlet Organiser cast the European unrest as a "left-Islamist mobilization."

The lesson is important: the same images from the streets of Paris travel to opposite audiences carrying opposite meanings. For the left, they show "police terror"; for the right, "Africans and leftist radicals." This does nothing for the protesters. It is, however, exactly how a burned town hall in Limoges becomes an argument in someone else's hands.

A Track That Needs a Voter

Now to the party that stands to gain the most.

The idea of steering Europe back to Russian gas did not appear this autumn. As early as the spring of 2025, according to Politico, Steve Witkoff, who speaks openly of his friendship with Vladimir Putin, had his team compile a list of every American energy sanction on Russia, with a view to lifting them. At the time the idea found little traction in the White House.

By October 2026 it had become policy. On October 9, the U.S. Treasury issued a general license, and on October 14 a bipartisan group of 12 senators called the arrangement with Moscow on diesel fuel a betrayal of the Ukrainian people. Trump then signed the order waiving part of the Graham Act sanctions. And the New York Times report, as summarized by Ukraine Today, contains a sentence worth keeping in mind to the end: although European politicians have publicly rejected Russian gas, voters in Europe, as in America, will inevitably want cheaper energy. European officials, by the same account, concede that a return of Russian gas would bring prices down.

Here lies the track's central problem: Brussels is holding firm. In January the EU adopted a regulation phasing out Russian gas imports. At the negotiating table, the argument "lift the sanctions and buy from Moscow" goes nowhere.

I contend that this is precisely the line beyond which the street becomes the main instrument. If the case for lifting sanctions fails at the table, only the voter can change a government's mind. The protesters need not demand Russian gas for this to work. A man dying of thirst does not specify which tap he wants to drink from; the thirst is enough, and whoever controls the tap draws the conclusion. The first signs are already here. At their October 15-16 summit, EU leaders called for joint action against soaring energy prices, and Finland's prime minister, Petteri Orpo, said bluntly that people and businesses must be guaranteed cheap prices. The distance from "cheap" to "cheap at any price" is not great.

The Calendar and the Intent

Two things keep this track from looking abstract: an electoral calendar and an intent set down in writing.

The calendar first. Spain holds snap elections on November 29, to be followed by France, Italy and Poland. Alberto Alemanno, a professor of EU law, described this as an unprecedented "super-cycle" of national elections and predicted that the protests would sit at the center of every one of those campaigns.

Then the intent. The U.S. National Security Strategy published in December 2025 speaks of "cultivating resistance" to Europe's current trajectory within European nations, and of support for "patriotic" parties. This is not a reconstruction or a leak; it is an official text.

Spain occupies a special place in this story. It alone in NATO rejected the target of 5% of GDP for defense, at the Hague summit in June 2025, and later refused the use of its bases for the war against Iran. In July 2026 Trump ordered a halt to economic ties with Madrid. Spain was slapped then for defiance on defense. The track has since changed: the issue now is not NATO contributions but the return of Russia as Europe's energy partner.

There is one more mechanism, and it may matter more than everything else. For the street to serve someone else's interest, the protesters need not share that interest at all. A left-leaning youth revolt accompanied by riots, looting and burning town halls pushes the frightened voter toward the parties of law and order. Those are exactly the parties the American strategy calls "patriotic." And the frames already circulating online, "Africans at the protests" and "left-Islamist mobilization," only give that push more force.

No Gold Is 1,000 Fine

An honest analysis must also show what does not fit the pattern.

In Spain, the protests are aimed above all at the People's Party, Vox and Catalonia's Junts, which on October 2 voted down the government's housing decrees, and Vox is ideologically the Spanish party closest to Trump. Riding the wave, Pedro Sánchez called early elections and will campaign on housing. In Albania, the protest grew out of opposition to a luxury resort on the southern coast linked to the same Jared Kushner, while Prime Minister Edi Rama blames "foreign hands" without naming any or offering proof. And the only march where the slogan "Peace with Russia" was heard, a Berlin rally by the Projekt M1llion movement, drew about 2,600 people.

But there is no such thing as gold of 1,000 fineness. No great social process runs like a clock wound by a single hand. A protest rooted in real grievance inevitably branches out, and some of its branches strike in directions that do not suit whoever profits from it. The exceptions show that the street is alive rather than painted on. They do not, however, cancel the main vector: Europeans are paying the bill for the energy crisis, and the track for returning Russian gas is collecting the argument that payment produces.

November Will Tell

So what has happened? Europe's street rose out of real pain: expensive energy, hollowed-out budgets and gutted education programs. That pain has a specific origin in a war against Iran launched from Washington. The same people in Washington now offer Europe a way out from which Moscow gains the most, and the street hands them their strongest argument: it is the voter who wants cheap energy.

The coming month will show how well this logic works. On November 2, French lycées reopen, and the movement will either return to the streets or fade over the holiday. On November 11, Spain goes on general strike, and on November 29 it elects a new parliament. What deserves watching is not the slogans in the streets but what surfaces in the statements of governments and parties. If, under pressure from the street, someone in Europe is the first to utter the formula "lift sanctions for the sake of cheap energy," it will become clear who first opened the tap.