Cui bono – who benefits from the riots?

By day, tens of thousands of young people demonstrated peacefully for better schools, affordable living and against more surveillance. By evening, barricades were burning. Since then, the talk has been about the evening.

I. One day, two pictures

On 31 October 2026 the initiative “Gen Z regelt” (“Gen Z sorts it out”) and other groups called for demonstrations in more than thirty German cities. Tens of thousands came; the organisers speak of a hundred thousand. During the day it remained peaceful almost everywhere.

In the evening the picture changed. In Frankfurt, where according to the Hessian interior minister about 8,000 people had demonstrated, shop windows on the Zeil were smashed and shops looted. A gun shop was attacked, Molotov cocktails were thrown at police officers, and at least thirty people were arrested. In Hamburg barricades burned and around 120 people were temporarily detained. In Berlin 27 police officers were slightly injured and almost sixty people arrested. In Cologne the police used water cannon.

Who did the rioting has only partly been established. The Hessian interior minister spoke first of about sixty, later of around a hundred left-wing extremist violent offenders. The live ticker of Hessian public broadcasting renamed itself in the evening because the later unrest on the Zeil seemed “no longer directly connected with the protest”. Hundreds of young people were out there who evidently had little to do with the demonstration. The same ticker mentions videos that appear to show heavy-handed police action against peaceful participants. Their context is unclear. The police union GdP spoke of “autonomous and partly masked persons” who had to be distinguished from the peaceful demonstrators. The organisers distanced themselves from the violence.

The violence is not to be glossed over. Whoever throws firebombs at people and loots shops commits serious crimes. But it was not what the tens of thousands had taken to the streets for.

II. What was demanded

The demands are public. According to reports by ZDF and Correctiv, “Gen Z regelt” called for: more weight for young people in politics, better schools and affordable living costs, no cuts to education, social services, culture and health care, no unequal sharing of burdens in which corporations profit and billions go into rearmament, and explicitly: no expansion of surveillance, no new military service and no conscription screening.

One can argue about each of these demands. Aimless they are not.

III. What is left of them

On the day after, the statements read as follows. Federal Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt saw peaceful protests taken over by “violence-prone left-wing groups and troublemakers from the migrant milieu” and demanded “harsh penalties”. Hesse’s interior minister Roman Poseck called for “early and tough action”. Minister-President Boris Rhein announced consequences. The CDU general secretary Franziska Hoppermann said the protests had had no clear goal.

There were other voices too. The Green Party co-chair Franziska Brantner demanded that the federal government must answer the young people. The SPD politician Dirk Wiese warned that the violence must not overshadow the concerns of the young. But they, too, spoke first about the violence and then about the concerns.

That is the first finding. The demands barely appear in the reactions. Where they do appear, it is as something that must be “taken seriously”, without anyone saying what follows from it. And from the governing party comes the claim that there was no clear goal, although the goals are on record in writing. The young are heard, and then ticked off.

IV. Who benefits from the pictures?

The question “cui bono” is a question, not an answer. Whoever benefits from an event has not thereby brought it about. Nor do we claim so. We only ask whom the pictures from that evening benefit, regardless of who caused them.

They benefit those who do not want to answer the demands. Schools, living costs and military service have to be negotiated; looting does not. Whoever talks about violence does not have to talk about money.

They benefit the AfD. The pictures of burning barricades and the phrase “migrant milieu”, put into circulation by a federal minister, fit its narrative without it having to lift a finger. Whether Dobrindt’s attribution is accurate has not yet been substantiated.

They benefit the violence-prone groups themselves. They get a stage they could never have built on their own, and they turn the peaceful majority into a backdrop.

They benefit the looters, quite simply through the loot they carried off.

And they can benefit those who have long wanted more powers for the security authorities. That is the subject of the next section.

V. The irony of surveillance

Since April 2026 the Bundestag has had before it the federal government’s so-called Security Package 2.0. It would allow the Federal Criminal Police Office, the Federal Police and the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees to search for people by facial recognition in images from the internet, and it would enable the automated analysis of large data sets. At the hearing in the interior committee on 21 September, several experts considered the drafts unconstitutional. The Federal Data Protection Commissioner rejects them in their present form. AlgorithmWatch warned that they would create the technical precondition for the comprehensive tracking of everyone in public space. The package has not been passed.

One of the demands of the young was: no expansion of surveillance. Of all things, the evening of their protest now supplies pictures with which an expansion could be justified: masked offenders, looters disappearing into the crowd, videos one would like to analyse.

We state what is established today and what is not. Up to the day after, we found no statement explicitly linking the riots to the Security Package or to facial recognition. What was demanded were harsh penalties and tough action. Whether the link will be made remains to be seen.

That it can be made is shown by two cases from the recent past. After the G20 summit in Hamburg in 2017, the Hamburg police built a biometric database of facial templates from around 32,000 video and image files. Hamburg’s data protection commissioner ordered its deletion in 2018. The administrative court overturned the order in 2019. And after the Solingen attack in August 2024, the then federal government launched within a few weeks a security package that included, among other things, biometric matching on the internet. That part failed in the Bundesrat in October 2024. It is now back on the table in a new form.

VI. Not a plan, but a machine

One need impute intent to no one to understand how this works. Every participant acts according to their own logic. The violence-prone seek confrontation, the looters the opportunity, the police demand the tools they consider necessary, the ministry wants to get through a law it has been negotiating for months, the opposition on the far right collects pictures, and the media show what is burning. Nobody has to coordinate with anybody. The result is directed all the same: the protest against more surveillance becomes material for more surveillance, and the protest for better schools becomes a debate about punishment.

That is what in our texts we call the Megamachine. It needs no one at the helm, because it functions emergently. It automatically puts to use whatever happens, according to the interests of those who sit at its levers. An event that aimed in a different direction is redirected by it in the direction it was heading anyway.

VII. The cross-check: France

That the demands need not inevitably go under is shown by a look across the border. In France, on the same day, 320,000 people took to the streets according to the interior ministry; the organisers spoke of almost half a million. There, too, there were clashes and 290 arrests. Nevertheless, the content is being discussed there: Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu has met the student unions and is considering measures against the cost of living. Whether anything follows from this is open.

The difference does not lie in the violence, which occurred in both countries. Another difference is visible: in France it was the third weekend of protests in a row, and the trade unions stand beside the students. Whether that tips the balance cannot be proven. But much suggests that this holds: whoever comes only once is judged by their worst pictures. Whoever comes back is judged by their demands.

VIII. What remains

In “Youth Is Our Future” we described how states have made themselves incapable of acting through debt: there is no money for the causes of the protests, but there is for suppressing them. The 31st of October has not refuted that finding.

The question of who benefits from the riots therefore has a simple answer that requires no imputation: they do not benefit the young. Their demands for better schools, affordable living and less surveillance stand worse on the day after than on the morning before. Whoever wants to help them must talk about these demands, now of all times.

The organisers want to take to the streets again in about three weeks. Then it will become clear whether their demands or the pictures of 31 October determine the debate, and whether by then the Security Package 2.0 is being justified with these pictures.

Further reading: Youth Is Our Future · The Machine within the Machine · The Megamachine – where to start?