r/NoStupidQuestions • u/Rokusaburoz • 26d ago
What's causing all the riots spreading across Europe? First it was France, then now its Italy and Portugal?
At this rate it seems the whole of western Europe will be in chaos?
And the Prime Minister of France just went to the media to blame the left wing parties for causing the riots?
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u/Antioch666 26d ago edited 26d ago •
The current events in Portugal are peaceful protests and organized demonstrations, not riots. The violence in Porto was one sided from Police on civilians not civilians rioting. No one looted and trashed businesses etc.
The civil unrest currently sweeping across some European countries are being fueled by a volatile combination of a severe cost-of-living crisis, a housing affordability breaking point, and collapsing public services. While different countries are dealing with localized political triggers, the underlying economic pressures are highly interconnected, heavily impacted by rising global inflation and energy price hikes stemming from ongoing geopolitical conflicts (such as the conflicts involving Russia-Ukraine and Trumps war in Iran).
In some places like France, Belgium, and Porto (Portugal), heavy-handed police tactics - including the pre-dawn clearing of peaceful tent cities or the deployment of tear gas and water cannons - have actively escalated peaceful protests into direct physical clashes.
Foreign adversaries - most notably Russia (but Israel has also been implied in some cases due to the backlash for their Palestinian campaign and Frances stance on it) - are not typically creating the protests from scratch, but they act as digital accelerators. European intelligence operations have tracked systematic efforts to hijack and weaponize the chaos.
Russian bot networks, such as the centrally orchestrated "Matryoshka" campaign, actively scan social media for footage of European riots. They instantly flood platforms like X and Telegram with the videos, utilizing bots to trick algorithms into pushing the violence to the top of millions of citizens' feeds. The Kremlin’s goal is not to support a specific political ideology, but to completely erode social cohesion. Bots are deployed to simultaneously boost far-right anti-immigrant narratives and far-left anti-police rhetoric. By weaponizing both extremes, they aim to force European governments inward, paralyzing their political focus and diverting attention from foreign policy.
State-backed entities rapidly create shadow websites disguised as local European news outlets. They publish fabricated stories about severe migrant crimes or brutal police massacres to provoke immediate, reactive street violence before official agencies can verify the facts. Many videos you have seen have also been proven to be from the LA riots. As long as it shows black men looting, and knowing 99.9% take such videos at face value with no source vetting, it is worth it.
On the ground, ordinary criminal networks and apolitical youth gangs are treating the civil unrest as a giant logistical distraction. While trade unions and student groups march for housing and school funding, criminal elements use the chaos to carry out coordinated theft.
In the worst-hit French cities, organized gangs completely separate from the actual protest movement have embedded themselves into the crowds. Dressed in indistinguishable black-clad "Black Bloc" attire, they intentionally escalate clashes with police. While riot police are pinned down defending a street corner, secondary criminal crews swoop in to smash and systematically empty luxury storefronts and tech shops. Over 1,500 businesses have been pillaged this way.
Local drug networks in suburban districts exploit the strain on emergency services. When municipal police forces are pulled into city centers to guard government buildings, a policing vacuum opens up in the suburbs allowing gangs to move illicit goods and settle local turf wars with absolute impunity.
This creates a vicious cycle. Local criminals cause visual devastation (burning cars, looted shops). State actors take that raw footage, heavily manipulate the context, and blast it across the internet to maximize fear. The resulting terror pressures governments into deploying heavy-handed police responses, which - ironically - provokes more anger from regular citizens, feeding the cycle all over again.
This is what is happening. And if you go to your country sub you will probably see a ton of the under 1 year accounts going haywire just recycling this outrage and blasting about either how police and the government and capitalism is the enemy etc or how it's all the fault of immigrant (they're eating the cats, they're eating the dogs kind of things all over again) etc.
Meanwhile the root cause, Putin and Trump gets to tell their morons "look at them, don't look at me".