The Briefing Room: Are Gen Z movements reshaping politics?

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1:32In May, the Chief Justice of India unwittingly gave a name to a generational protest. He called unemployed young people cockroaches, and the mass youth movement that had begun in the wake of the sudden cancellation of a national examination took on the title, the Cockroach Janter Party. But India hasn't been the only country that has seen Gen Z, people aged between 14 and 29, engaging in mass protests this year. It's been happening all over the place, from Serbia to Kenya. Different grievances, different circumstances, but the same generation. So what are the youth revolting about and are they winning?

2:12Step inside the briefing room and together we'll find out.

2:20First, I want to find out a bit more about the cockroach protests in India. Joining me to discuss that is Dr. Nayana Prakash, research affiliate at the Mindaroo Centre for Technology and Democracy at the University of Cambridge. Nayana, tell us how this cockroach protest all began. The cockroach protests, as we now know them, ran from between the beginning of June and the end of July 2026 in various states across India. And the term cockroach has kind of been adopted as a badge of honour by protesters. The reason why these young people were protesting is specifically about a broken education and examination system in India.

2:57It's quite difficult for us to perhaps relate to in the UK, but the Indian examination system is one of the most challenging in the entire world. And the NEET exams, as they're referred to, which is the National Medical Examinations, is one of the most difficult exams in India. Every year, around 2 million students take these exams. 2 million? 2 million, applying for around 130 ,000 places. So as you can imagine, demand is very, very high, supply is very low. And of course, if you fail the exam one year, you're put in the next batch, you're joining an ever increasing group of people. Now this year, the government voided that national medical exam, the NEETS, because it emerged that some of the questions had leaked in advance.

3:40This isn't the first time it's happened. It's actually the second time it's happened in three years. And what that means is for students who've been trying out for these exams and working incredibly hard for years and years, they have to wait potentially another year to join this huge batch of people for what was already a really, really difficult shot at becoming a doctor. And the sense of pressure on Indian students is absolutely massive and unemployment rates are really high. So around 40 % of India's graduates under the age of 25 are unemployed, which is a staggering some. And what it means is that young people took to protesting the idea that there aren't opportunities for them.

4:21What do they do? I mean, being a doctor is a way to secure a job, not just for the next few years, but for the rest of your life. And if you haven't got a shot at that, what are young people to do? So this exam was cancelled. A lot of people felt what desperation? I mean, what happened as a consequence? And many young people committed suicide as a result of not being able to sit these exams. Seriously? Yep. The study environment is intense. And, you know, just to give an idea of what it means, it's not just for students themselves, but for an entire family. A student, for example, from a sort of small town, their entire family might try and move to a city to have better access to school education.

5:00They might pay, they will pay for extra tuition for their son or their daughter. They will likely take another job to be able to afford to do so. These students aren't having a social life, they're not doing anything, their entire life really depends on them being able to be a doctor. And especially for lower middle class families or working class families, that's seen as an opportunity to raise the family out of poverty and uncertainty. So this cancellation was a disaster in itself. Yeah. But the way you're describing it is also the protests have something to do with the whole structure of that educational opportunity and its interface with jobs.

5:36Definitely. I mean, young people in India, what they're experiencing is just a lack of hope and an intense amount of pressure. And the pressure cooker has been going for a long time. And it's finally time to start letting off some kind of steam. As I mentioned, it's not just to do with the medical system, but to do with the broader education and employment system in India. You know, what kind of jobs can young people hope for? What kind of futures can young people hope for? What kind of form have the protests taken? And I think associated with that, how widespread have the protests been? Because India is a big country, many languages and so on.

6:10Yeah, well, the protests started in Delhi, in India's north, which is obviously very significant because Uttar Pradesh, the state that Delhi is in, is the state that is currently held by the ruling party, the BJP, which is the party of Prime Minister Modi. The protests spread to states like Bengal, to Bihar, to Assam, you know, other states that are held by the ruling party. But support for these protests has run all over the country. There's a kind of digital element to them where people are sharing videos online, sharing memes online, showing support for protesters online. This is also true for the diasporic population, population outside India or people of Indian origin.

6:49And there's also been lots of support shown online as well. But then, of course, there's been an in-person protest movement of nonviolent protests, people kind of camping outside popular sites in India with placards and organising. So tell me two possibly related things. Firstly, the form the protests have taken in physical form. And then the other aspect of it, the social media aspect and people connecting with each other, because in one sense, they're two diametrically opposed things. One which is entirely virtual and one of which has to be physical. Yeah, I think I would argue that there's almost no such thing as entirely physical these days without the online element.

7:28I mean, even while people are at these protests and what they're doing is they have placards, they're demanding, you know, either the exam comes back or they were demanding some kind of statement from the government to acknowledge what's happening in student education in India. People are taking to the streets in marches. They're chanting. They're aware of the spotlight on them from social media. There's no such thing anymore as the completely offline. And they are speaking to their online audiences. And so what's happening online is that people are watching these videos on TikTok, on Instagram, on other social media platforms, and it's almost like they're there in real time.

8:06And for many people older or younger who couldn't be there, I think the element of social media as almost 24-7 TV is really significant. Right. And how did the government react to the protests? I mean, after all, in the first place, this senior figure calls people cockroaches, which is perhaps not the most emollient thing to say? Yeah, I think there's been over the years, a great deal of disregard for Gen Z by the establishment in India. And initially, it was clear that the government was dismissing the protests, or perhaps, you know, suggesting that young people were anti-nationalist. That's a really common term that's levelled against people who are against the BJP is that they're anti-nationalist, they don't agree with what the government's doing or what the party's doing.

8:52Once it became clear that the protests weren't going away, and indeed that they had a lot of support from people both in and outside India, that's when Modi started to make kind of statements to the protesters, which were seen as being too little, too late. The protesters themselves were met with kind of widespread violence from police. There was harassment, there was beating, there was use of tear gas, people have died at protests, people have been injured at protests. And when you consider that some of these people will be as young as 15 or 16, and the scale of the violence against them is really quite horrifying.

9:23Was it the government that orchestrated that violence? Or was it, if you like, the usual police reaction, which the government then had to try and deal with? I think, you know, if you think of the police as being an instrument of the government, I agree. Initially, the police probably responded in how they would deal with regular protesters. Of course, then, you know, the idea that these protesters are children in a lot of cases, and the government came down very, very hard on them. And in part, that's because this government is not used to facing that level of protest from young people. There's an interesting question here about the support that these young people might have been getting from their parents, many of whom may very well have been supporters of the Indian government.

10:03I think it's a real deal-breaking moment for supporters of the BJP because, of course, they also have children who are sacrificing a lot of things to be at these protests. And they've experienced probably first and second hand what the Indian education system is like. And what these students are protesting for is the right to have a job and do exams. I mean, who can argue with that, right? They want to be given opportunities. I think it also is a challenge to the way the BJP has done politics in its 12-year reign, which is that it's largely been on the grounds of dividing people in terms of religion and in terms of caste.

10:39Now, the generational gaps between people has been sort of ignored. And the idea that Gen Z actually doesn't care about religion as a dividing factor, doesn't really care about caste as a dividing factor, but sees themselves as being very different from older generations is really significant. One of the things that's very difficult about protests, and particularly for young people, is to keep them going. It's very difficult to keep the momentum going. There are other things going on. You have to get on with your life. What would you say about how the momentum has or hasn't been maintained? Well, I think one of the most successful aspects of this protest is that the education minister did resign.

11:14And that's the first senior minister during Modi's reign who has resigned in response to protests. So it's a really big win, I think, for the protests. Also Modi himself has, you know, he refused to sack the education minister. It may seem strange in the UK where we're used to politicians resigning on basically a weekly basis at this point, but it's very unusual in India. So that's a win. Of course, these are young people. They won't be able to protest 24-7. But I think the government would be remiss to ignore this moment because it does feel like a moment of change. And it also feels like quite a lot of ordinary Indians are on the side of young people.

11:52And that will carry them. That momentum will be significant for the next election. Nina, you're going to stay with us and we're going to broaden this conversation out and bring in a couple of other guests. Erica France is Associate Professor in Political Science at Michigan State University. And Matthew Siebel is Lead Research Fellow at the Nonviolent Action Lab at the Harvard Kennedy School. With the new Schwab Teen Investor account, teens can gain hands-on investing experience and build positive money habits. It's an account co-owned by you and your teen, so you can monitor and engage with the account while your teen learns how to invest and manage money.

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13:16Now, you look at direct action for a living, and I want to talk about some of the other recent protests and what they tell us. So why would you start us off? Yeah, why don't we start with Nepal, which I think was a pretty prominent Gen Z protest last year. So September last year, the Nepalese government imposes a ban on social media platforms like Facebook, YouTube, WhatsApp. And the government did that because it claimed that these websites had failed to register according to new government rules for a digital services tax. But many speculated that the ban was really about kind of popular anger at political corruption.

13:51Images had been flying across social media that summer of politicians and their children kind of enjoying these lives of luxury. They were called Nepo babies. Meanwhile, youth unemployment in Nepal is north of 20 percent. So it felt like they were rubbing salt in the wound, if that makes sense. And the kind of social media ban was the last straw that tipped Nepalese into protests. So the ban is imposed on September 4th. There are peaceful protests on September 8th. Tens of thousands of people attended. It came together very quickly with, I think, a far greater turnout than you might expect. But then things quickly became violent.

14:23And it's not clear to me where that starts, whether it was initiated by police repression or protesters throwing projectiles at police or something like this that prompts a crackdown. But the result either way is that violence very quickly spun out of control. That evening into the next day, the parliament building, the president's home, those various MPs were put to the torch. Ultimately, there were, I think, several dozen fatalities and hundreds wounded in these clashes. And that day, September 9th, the next day, the prime minister, Sharma Oli, resigned and parliament was dissolved shortly thereafter.

14:54That's absolutely incredible in some ways that a ban on social media should in the end lead to fatalities and to the resignation of the prime minister. Erica, what kind of things were people looking at on social media that got them so riled up? Matthew already mentioned this whole idea of Nepo kids and Nepo babies. This was frustration with the children of the political elite living a life of luxury. So one image is the child of a minister's son, and he is posing next to this Christmas tree with a stack of luxury boxes like Louis Vuitton and so forth. And then another image is a child of a former judge who is at a luxury restaurant with his Mercedes Benz.

15:39So as you might imagine, those sorts of images are not going to sit well when you have a populist where, you know, one in four live under the poverty line. Niana, how was social media used to organise protests? So it's already been mentioned by Matthew, a number of social media platforms were banned and taken down by the government, but obviously some were not. And one of those platforms was Discord, which is well known across the world as being a platform popular with the gaming community. You can make posts and you can also have voice calls with people. And so that platform was used by Gen Z to coordinate protests and to organize a march on the government.

16:17And so significant was this protest and so all encompassing that after some days, the prime minister actually resigned and fled the country. And, you know, that was seen as a great success already. But six months later, the young people on Discord agreed there would be elections, basically. They kind of quite literally changed the shape and the scope of Nepal's political landscape for a short period of time. So young people using a platform essentially used by gamers managed to exert sufficient power, not just to get rid of a prime minister, but effectively to get elections. Yes. And the elections themselves were seen as a broad success and obviously owed a great deal to the Gen Z movement.

16:57There are a lot more young candidates. The prime minister himself now is, while not actually Gen Z, very, very young. He's a former rapper and now politician and is seen to be much more in step with what Gen Z wants. Right. OK. Matthew, that's an example of a protest that has succeeded. Can you give an example or a couple of examples of where the result may have been different? Let's talk about Serbia, which is, I guess, a different movement trajectory that's still up in the air. So it remains to be seen exactly how the outcome will be. The inciting incident for these protests in November 2024, there was a train station collapse at Novi Sad, which killed something like 16 people.

17:36And people suspected that the cause was shoddy oversight and kind of corruption and contracting practices. And so most people demanded an investigation, which President Vujicic's government kind of resisted at first. Students began organizing protests in response. They began blockades at universities and lockouts at universities. I think in March 2025, they wind up organizing one of the largest protests in Serbia's history in Belgrade. They're incredibly well organized. The movement is kind of leaderless and decentralized, but there are lots of student assemblies that are meeting regularly to discuss tactics.

18:09They take minutes at these meetings. They come to collective decisions. They have social media teams working to boost content. Like they're very, very organized. But the flip side of that is that the government largely has spurned their demands for reform. At first, they tried various forms of thuggish repression. They brand these youth as a foreign-funded mob. They kind of look the other way at violence against protesters. And they've largely resisted calls for reform until pretty recently. Protests continued throughout 2025. Only very recently this summer, over a year and a half into the sustained protests, President Vucic finally agrees to hold snap elections later this fall, which have just been announced for October.

18:48So we'll see how those turn out, whether the student protests wind up successfully achieving a government transition or if Vucic manages to regain power through elections this fall. Can I just note something really interesting here? Whereas in India and in Nepal, the proximate causes were things that might be said to be close to the hearts of the youth. In other words, social media and these examinations. In Serbia, it's the collapse of a station canopy. How does it come about that the youth get interested in that? I'm not quite sure why that wouldn't be an issue that would concern youth, right?

19:22Like they take trains just like everybody else. They feel the kind of neglect of government services in their communities. And they also get the sense that in response to the train station, the government was pretty condescending to youth protesters. They really kind of dismissed calls for accountability out of hand. So I think young people were kind of rightfully frustrated by that, just like anybody would be. Erica, in some ways, I mean, older listeners might say this sounds all very familiar. We have the Arab Spring protests in 2011, and then we had the Occupy Wall Street movement. Neither of them in the end seems to really have changed very much, or at least that's an argument you could make.

20:00Yeah. So, you know, this isn't our first rodeo with youth protests, you know, gaining momentum globally. And unfortunately, there are lots of examples where youth movements or just protests in general, particularly against authoritarian governments, are unlikely to lead to much meaningful change. In some instances, protests can change the political debate in ways that can eventually shape policies. But even when you have leadership change, a lot of times it doesn't lead to something that is meaningful in the long term. And that certainly was the case, thinking back to the Arab Spring 2011, where you have all of this optimism that these youth movements that have really unsettled these authoritarian governments are going to lead to lasting change.

20:49And as with today's protests, there was a reliance on the Internet and social media back in 2011. We often forget that it was still around them. So with the Arab Spring, a lot of the protests were organized on Facebook. And there was a lot of optimism that social media could potentially be used as a vehicle for positive change. Looking back, we now know that perhaps we should have a more pessimistic outlook. Social media in many ways can be a double-edged sword. It makes it very easy for these groups to organize and to get momentum going for a movement. But then many times are kind of leaderless.

21:25They kind of shun hierarchy and these movements can kind of fizzle out. So a lot of these youth led movements are really not that skilled at translating their mobilization into kind of a more like lasting organizational structure that you would need to enact change to get change. Now, in the building on that, you're a technology researcher and social medias, as we've heard, developed massively in the last 10 years. It's not entirely new, but it has changed. Now, how have you seen young protesters using it in ways that, say, wouldn't have been used 15 years ago? Well, I think there are two big shifts, and one of them has to do with social media itself.

22:00You know, as been mentioned, obviously, it's been around for a little while. We can't pretend it's brand new at this point, but it is a lot more image-led and more visual than it was 15 years ago. You know, platforms like TikTok, like Instagram, they're completely image-based and video-based platforms, basically. You don't need to speak the same language as someone to understand what's going on in a different part of the world. And that's a really significant aspect of this, because if you're opening up TikTok and you're seeing protesters in Nepal, it doesn't matter if you don't speak the language or if you don't understand exactly what they're protesting.

22:31What you're seeing is young people on the streets. These are countries that haven't had reliable internet access for that long. So in some ways, it is new to be able to use social media in this way in certain parts of the world. The other point is that there's even less faith, I think, in traditional media than there was 15 years ago. So in India, this has become a really big centerpiece for this particular wave of protests. There's been references to the lapdog media, which is what the traditional media has been referred to by Gen Z protesters. India's kind of press freedom is very, very low.

23:02It's fallen under the current BJP government. And so social media is seen to be individual led and more trusted alternative, actually, to traditional forms of media. Matthew, can we look at the form that the protests have taken in this particular wave, to what extent they have been peaceful, as Niana was describing in India, or violent, as we've heard in Nepal? Yeah. So I think it's very context dependent and we should be very careful not to paint too broad a brush here. I think many movements are both. So it's kind of difficult to dichotomize movements as either violent or nonviolent. You know, is it is it a peaceful movement if one protester burned a car at some point while, you know, tens of thousands of other people spent the entire day chanting peaceful slogans?