EU Rearmament Billions Help Wage War on Own Populations

While this weekend was comparatively peaceful compared to the one prior, the underlying factors driving the mass discontent in Europe aren’t going anywhere. If anything, they are only set to get worse.

According to Politico, EU leaders are preparing to seek a deal on roughly 45 billion euros for Ukraine by the end of this year. That’s just a portion of what unelected Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is demanding—and the number will undoubtedly grow.

At the same time, the EU remains supportive of the imperial grand conflict in the Middle East set to cause shortages and send the prices of just about everything higher.

AND the EU’s stated goal is to rearm and be prepared for war with Russia. It is, thus far, a failure, but that doesn’t mean the new military hardware won’t come in handy against a restless population tired of price hikes, social spending cuts, and declining living standards.

Just last week Germany’s “most influential economic think tank,” the Kiel Institut, argued that Europe’s hundreds of billions on rearmament can boost the wider economy. The think tanks have been arguing this for some time now, and it ain’t happening.

As we here at NC and others have been arguing for some time, the weapons bonanza to take on the evil Russians serves as a useful excuse to destroy what remains of the European social commons. [1] Coming on top of all of Europe’s self-inflicted wounds of the past five years, as well as already-present disadvantages, the reallocation of social spending towards weapons manufacturers was bound to worsen the economic situation.

And so it has, as events of this weekend demonstrate again.

Up to 800,000 people in France🇫🇷 were on the streets for the uprising against the neoliberal government of Emmanuel Macron today, according to the CGT trade union; a rebellion against the oligarch class.

This is a revolt by the struggling working classes of France who have seen their living conditions decline and their wealth disappear, not because of immigrants, but the immense concentration of wealth by the shareholder class, at the expense of everyone else.

In 2024, 9.8 million people in metropolitan France live below the poverty line, with 16.3% being at risk of poverty in 2026. Households have seen a catastrophic loss of purchasing power, an IFE estimate shows a family of two adults and two children has lost €1,200 in purchasing power since 2024.

By 2024, the richest 1% in France controlled 27.7% of total national household wealth, and took in 11.8% of national income.

In education, the situation is shockingly dire. 15.4 million teaching hours have been lost in France across the last school year because absent staff were not replaced. The average secondary school class size is now above 30, a record high. 53% of schools are short of teachers. And the approximate salary for teachers? Just €2100.

A child born and schooled in a deprived neighbourhood in France has less chance of escaping their socioeconomic background than in most developed nations according to the OECD.

The media wants to divide people by blaming the protests on immigrants, pushing the narrative of ‘indigenous French vs immigrant protesters’ to completely avoid class struggle.

In reality this is the French working classes rising up in unity as their living standards and material conditions deteriorate, while Macron’s government continues to serve the oligarchy. https://t.co/C3O7QOHRUj

— Afshin Rattansi (@afshinrattansi) October 24, 2026

In Milan:

Italy. Milan now. Italian soldiers, trained for war, protecting Milan Cathedral. A symbol of Christianity in Europe and in Italy. https://t.co/pui9LXdCpb

— RadioGenoa (@RadioGenoa) October 24, 2026

Milan was mostly quiet while the action moved to Florence, Bologna, Turin, and elsewhere:

INSANE: Police CLASH with protesters across Italy as October 24 demonstrations escalate. Riot police confront crowds in Bologna, while officers in Florence reportedly charge protesters and block access to the city center.

Italy is having one hell of a weekend. https://t.co/HG4GYLs9Ai

— Def Noodles (@defnoodlesreal) October 24, 2026

And In France a police/counterterrorism presence reportedly 70,000-strong coupled with the rerouting of protest routes and the near-complete shutdown of cities, including mass transit, largely extinguished the violence of the previous week. Yet it does nothing about the economic situation largely driving the discontent. And protests, encampments, strikes, and violence are now present in nearly every country in the EU.

🇨🇿 Protests sweep Prague — dozens attempt to storm parliament building

The protest in the Czech capital was organized by the opposition in response to a new law changing how public media outlets are funded.

There are concerns that the legislation could allow the ruling parties to undermine journalistic independence.

One of the most heated moments of the nighttime demonstration came when protesters tried to force their way into the Chamber of Deputies building. Clashes with police followed, but no arrests were made, according to police spokesperson Eva Kropáčová.

— NEXTA (@nexta_tv) October 24, 2026

Back in Italy, while students and riots in the north gain the majority of the headlines, truck drivers and farmers are also striking in the south with some students there joining them. Many fishermen are also striking over high fuel costs. These actions are already resulting in empty store shelves, and the food supply chain breaking down presents a nightmare for governments far worse than student marches and some looting.

With more war in the Middle East looking more certain by the day and the EU determined to carry on with rearmament no matter the costs, the situation is unlikely to improve.

Yet the images of the military on the streets in Paris and Milan, and perhaps coming to a city near you very soon, helps bring the rearmament-austerity story full circle.

Despite all the money being burned at the altar of Project Ukraine, sober analysts conclude that European nations are woefully ill-equipped to successfully do much of any fighting there and no amount of money is going to change that for the foreseeable future. There are a variety of reasons for that, which we have been well covered and we won’t go into here.

But all the additional weaponry and surveillance goodies that aren’t immediately tossed into the corrupt pit of death that is Ukraine could be more likely to be used on an increasingly discontented population rather than against Russia. That has been taking place for some time—primarily via surveillance and militarized police roughing up people who are anti-genocide.

That genocide serves as the foundation for the Middle East conflagration producing economic shockwaves across the world. Europe is hit doubly hard due to its self-defeating economic war against Russia and determination to rearm no matter the costs. In addition to the ever-present neoliberal drive for austerity, Europe is now in what Frederic Lordon calls La Totale: 

La Totale [crisis of everything] marks the culmination of a bourgeois state that has been looming on the horizon for quite some time: a state reduced to two ministries — the Ministry of the Budget and the Ministry of the Interior. Or, to put it another way: the Ministry of Friends (the markets) and the Ministry of Enemies (the people). As the first runs up against the economic impasse of neoliberalism, the second comes to hold all the power. It is nothing more than a gathering of sadistic thugs at every level; this is indeed the novelty of Macronism.

It’s also a novelty of Scholzism, Merzism, Melonism, and of course, von der Leyenism.

And so here we come to the point. Europe remains incapable of any serious war effort against the Russians. It doesn’t even have the logistical capabilities to effectively move troops and weaponry to a hypothetical Eastern front.

There is no such problem in deploying weaponry in its own cities, however.

And so here we have the Italian news agency ANSA announcing the following:

The 500 paratroopers from the crack Folgore Brigade to be deployed in Milan after last weekend’s shocking youth rioting will be able to use Lince armoured cars and drones to intervene very quickly in the event of street violence…

Now I’m not a military hardware guy, but from what I can find, the VTLM Lince is a 4WD tactical vehicle developed by Iveco. As part of Italy’s rearmament push, it last year ordered an additional 658 tactical-logistic trucks for the Italian Army, extending the original contract signed in 2024 for 1,453 vehicles.

No point in letting them gather dust.

On the drone front, Europe is of course pouring billions into trying to learn from Ukraine and develop autonomous wonder weapons. Italy’s Leonardo is one of the leading European producers of drone technologies, specializing in surveillance, reconnaissance, and tactical support systems.

Italy is now holding tests with MBDA to mount the European firm’s armaments on the new Astore Levante drone being built by a joint venture between Leonardo and Turkey’s Baykar.

It has for years worked in close partnership with Israeli defense companies testing its weaponry on the captive population of Gaza and now features “AI algorithms for complex operational environments,” which I suppose could come in handy in Milan and other European cities.

At the EU level, Brussels is pouring hundreds of millions of euros has given Israeli technology start-ups run by ex-IDF soldiers nearly half a billion euros in research grants since the start of the Gaza genocide.

The EU is ramping up AI-driven population control intelligence, which has become notorious in Israel-Palestine. A host of companies claim they can detect suspicious behavior or other “anomalies” in all the data being vacuumed up.

For example, Israeli firm Toka Cyber has started to land contracts with European governments. According to Haaretz, it “straddles the world of active cyber and so-called passive intelligence: The company is secretive about its tech and when approached they refused to provide any details of their activities. When reminded that Haaretz revealed last year that the firm sells tech that hacks into security cameras and even alters their video feeds for intelligence and operational needs, Toka’s representatives responded: “allegedly.”

Cobwebs, an Israeli firm which specializes in collecting data from across all social media, even scraping content from those that self-delete after a set period of time, was used by Israel as part of its attempt to “identify” and subsequently kill Palestinians.

It was acquired by American private equity firm Spire Capital in 2023 and develops cyber intelligence solutions for enforcement bodies, national security agencies, and financial services across the world, but with a particular focus on the U.S. and Western Europe.

While Israel has its Palestine Laboratory, EU countries have mostly fine tuned their surveillance, imprisonment tech, and AI predictive systems on migrants and refugees.

It’s now being unleashed on protestors as European governments are now using facial recognition, IMSI catchers, drones, and AI predictive policing against those who oppose genocide, rearmament, and austerity.

It offers a reminder that all the hundreds of billions of euros being sucked out of education, healthcare, and infrastructure and redirected toward armoured vehicles and drones are just as likely to be deployed locally to squash unrest caused by austerity + war policies.

As the ruling classes of the Western ‘democracies’ increasingly resemble mafia clans, they won’t hesitate to use their new toys to keep the great ‘bust out’ on track.

And this likely result of the rearmament push should rank right up there with the fear of an actual conflict with Russia:

This is where I am politically right now. Despite Melenchon’s rousing speeches and appeals to appropriate post-Keynesian economic policies, the current European riots have sunk into their usual headless, directionless shape. The polls have hardly shifted – le Pen was already well ahead. Any ‘revolutionary’ situation will be captured by the far right. The awkward corollary of what I’ve written below is that if we seek to construct a serious, committed opposition, first we must elicit an equal and opposite fear grounded in reality. We must replace the manufactured fears of immigrants, public ‘debt’, bond markets and so on with an overriding objective fear. What will really happen to the West if we carry on like this? It’s an unfortunate fact that fear is the primary fuel for the hope, rational discussions of political economy and positive protest and action – aimed at what we’re FOR rather than against – that come later. Dupuy’s ‘enlightened catastrophism’ – @winlow_s has written about this https://t.co/mVzgdNqTgc and there’s a useful summary here. https://t.co/bsEgQxrCyL

— Steve Hall (@ProfHall1955) October 24, 2026