Around five hundred French university students were caught on video lining up in front of canteens, especially at Rennes II University (Northwest), to receive their free meals which have become a life-saving necessity after the cut of Personalized Housing Assistance (APL).
The sight of such long queues of college students is becoming less and less unusual, pointing to a covert precariousness that the student body suffers from.
In response to the clip that went viral, French opposition leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon, Founder of La France Insoumise party, said on X platform that the French students are starving, unlike Moroccan ones, criticizing president Macron of focusing on other countries’ problems and overlooking the French youth’s issues.
Union Pirate, the student trade union at Rennes II University, had to step in and distribute rations free of charge to more than 300 students at campus. The minister of Higher education was present at the University the same day but chose not to go check on the college students.
L’insoumission media outlet shared the same video and titled it “Under Macron, students are starving”. The clip received over 625K views on TikTok, 260K on X (former Twitter), and 120k on Instagram.
Since the election of Macron, the number of students living in precarious conditions multiplied by five, mainly after scraping the APL that used to offer a one-euro meal to each student, said journalist Clémence Guetté.
From Feb. 2022 to Feb. 2023, poverty among young people rose from 20% to 26%.