Tens of Thousands March Across Italy in Nationwide Strike Against Cost of Living and Military Spending

Tens of thousands of people took to the streets across Italy on Friday, 30 October 2026, as a nationwide 24-hour general strike brought marches to more than 40 cities, in the largest single day of protest yet in a wave of unrest that has been building against Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s government for two weeks.

The strike was called by the grassroots trade union Unione Sindacale di Base, known as the USB, and drew together workers, students, farmers, truck drivers and anti-war campaigners behind a set of demands that ranged from higher wages and stronger public services to an end to rising military spending, according to Reuters.

The demonstrations were largely peaceful, according to both Reuters and CNN, although police used a water cannon against protesters in Turin, rubbish bins were set on fire in Rome, and smoke flares and burning tyres blocked a main road junction in the port city of Genoa. Italy’s Interior Ministry said “preventative” arrests had been made ahead of the marches to head off violence.

The largest rallies took place in Milan, Turin and the capital, Rome, where young and old marched together to vent their anger at Meloni and her right-wing government, CNN reported. In Milan, demonstrators carried placards reading “Let’s oust the Meloni government — rebellion is just,” while in Naples some protesters burnt photographs of the prime minister.

Friday’s action was the sharpest escalation yet of a protest movement that began in mid-October and has now spread across much of Europe, where hundreds of thousands of people have demanded government action to ease the rising cost of living. It also posed the most direct challenge so far to a prime minister who has combined targeted economic concessions with a toughening line on public order.

What happened on Friday

According to Reuters, tens of thousands of people, mostly students and workers, took to the streets across Italy to demand higher wages and stronger public services, to protest against the rising cost of living and to oppose increased military spending. The USB called a 24-hour general strike, with protests planned in more than 40 cities. CNN put the figure higher, reporting mass demonstrations in more than 50 cities.

In Rome, a large march passed near the Colosseum, where protesters said they planned to set up tents and remain over the weekend, Reuters reported. Some rubbish bins were placed across streets and set on fire. Security was stepped up around the Colosseum, Italy’s most visited tourist attraction, and around Milan’s cathedral, according to Al Jazeera.

When some youngsters in Rome tried to set a dumpster on fire, others quickly extinguished the blaze, keen to avoid the type of violence that has marred similar protests in France, CNN reported. The contrast with the unrest of a fortnight earlier was striking: this time, the crowds largely policed themselves.

In Milan, protesters marched onto the city’s ring road before ending the march in front of the Politecnico di Milano university, Reuters reported. Demonstrators waved the red flags of the USB and carried placards bearing anti-government slogans. In Turin, farmers dumped manure on the streets as part of the protests, according to CNN, and police used a water cannon to push back students and left-wing activists who approached security cordons protecting the prefecture building, Reuters reported.

In Genoa, around 15,000 port workers, students and other demonstrators entered the port, Reuters reported, joining similar protests in Europe and elsewhere against the use of ports for arms shipments and highlighting the deaths of seafarers in conflicts from the Gulf to the Black Sea. Smoke flares and tyres were set on fire to block the main intersection between the port and the highway, blocking trucks exiting the port, according to CNN.

In Bologna, students called on the government to review education policy, CNN reported, while in Naples, protesters burnt photos of Meloni. The demands varied from city to city, but the thread running through them was the same: living costs, public services and the government’s spending priorities.

The strike that almost was not

Transport workers had been slated to join the pickets too, but abandoned their plans after Transport Minister Matteo Salvini threatened the sector with sanctions, CNN reported. The USB urged taxi drivers to go ahead with strikes despite receiving a similar warning. The intervention showed how seriously the government took the prospect of a transport shutdown — and how far it was prepared to go to limit the strike’s economic bite.

A strong anti-war sentiment was in evidence throughout the day, CNN reported, with many protesters waving Palestinian flags as they marched and others holding banners opposing the government’s military spending. In Genoa, dockworkers mobilised against the “militarisation” of the port in a bid to block the export of Italian-made arms shipments to conflict zones, including Israel, according to CNN.

Unions have also issued a joint call with their counterparts in France, Greece, Spain, Turkiye and Morocco to demand an end to the wars in the Middle East, including the war in Gaza, and “an end to the militarisation of ports”, Al Jazeera reported. “Ports must not be used for the transport of weapons, ammunition, military equipment and troops,” the statement said.

Two weeks of mounting unrest

Friday’s strike did not come out of nowhere. The unrest emerged in mid-October amid concerns about the rising cost of living, higher fuel prices and conditions in the education sector, and student movements began criticising the policies of the government led by Meloni, calling for increased investment in public education and opposing military spending.

On 16 October, student demonstrations took place in several Italian cities under the slogan “No Meloni Day”, focused on the condition of school buildings, education funding, military expenditure, immigration policies affecting schools and solidarity with French students. Student groups denounced the progressive deterioration of school infrastructure and called for the €13 billion allocated to military spending to be redirected towards education, according to reporting of that day’s protests.

The following weekend, 17–18 October, brought clashes between young people and police in Milan, in which groups of mainly young people looted shops and smashed windows, Al Jazeera reported. Meloni responded by toughening laws on public gatherings and easing restrictions on the detention of minors. Her government later approved the deployment of 500 additional troops to Milan, according to Al Jazeera, and unveiled a new offence of “violent participation in public demonstrations”.

On Saturday, 24 October, demonstrations took place again across major Italian cities, including Rome, Milan, Turin and Bologna, with protesters raising concerns about the cost of living and war, while the authorities deployed hundreds of additional soldiers and police officers following the earlier clashes. About 1,500 officers were deployed in Rome and around 1,800 police officers and soldiers in Milan, according to reports of that day.

Friday’s strike was, in effect, the movement’s answer to that crackdown: bigger, broader and, for the most part, deliberately peaceful.

The government’s response so far

The government has not ignored the economic grievances. Last week it agreed on a 175 million euro ($195 million) aid package for truck drivers, farmers and fishermen hit by soaring fuel prices linked to the war in the Middle East, Al Jazeera reported. Measures to support young people and families — such as an annual bonus of 2,500 euros for workers under 30 — have also been inserted into the draft 2027 budget currently being discussed among the governing parties.

“I hope this can provide answers for young people in general… who feel that the state doesn’t care about them,” Meloni said at a news conference on Wednesday, according to Al Jazeera, stressing that the measures were “not for those who smash windows”.

The scale of the underlying squeeze helps explain why such measures have not calmed the streets. The prices paid in Italy for food, energy, transport and bills have risen by 68 percent since 2000, while the average wage fell by almost 5 percent, according to Al Jazeera. For many households, that combination — everything costing more while pay buys less — is the lived reality behind the slogans.

The government’s two-track approach, concessions on the one hand and tougher public-order laws on the other, reflects a calculation that the economic grievances are real but that the violence of 17–18 October gave it political cover to act firmly. The risk for Meloni is that the two tracks work against each other: every new restriction on protest feeds the argument, heard widely on Friday, that the government is more interested in controlling dissent than in addressing its causes.

Analysis: Why It Matters

A movement that has outgrown a single grievance

What makes Friday’s mobilisation significant is not any single demand but the breadth of the coalition behind it. Students angry about crumbling schools marched alongside farmers protesting fuel prices, truck drivers squeezed by operating costs, port workers refusing to handle arms shipments, and pensioners worried about healthcare. Each group has its own complaint; together they add up to a wider indictment of the government’s priorities.

That breadth is both the movement’s strength and its vulnerability. A coalition this wide is hard for a government to dismiss as a fringe, and it is hard to buy off with a single measure aimed at one group. But it is also hard to hold together: a student demanding better school buildings and a farmer demanding cheaper diesel do not necessarily share a political programme, and the government will be looking for the seams. The fact that the USB, a grassroots union rather than one of Italy’s big confederations, called the strike underlines how much of this energy sits outside the traditional structures of Italian labour politics — and therefore outside the government’s usual channels for negotiation.

The wages-versus-weapons argument at the heart of the budget fight

The most politically potent slogan on the streets on Friday was also the simplest: money spent on weapons is money not spent on schools, hospitals and wages. The students’ demand that €13 billion earmarked for military spending be redirected to education crystallises a choice the government would rather not frame so bluntly.

Meloni’s government, like others across Europe, has committed to higher defence spending in a period of war on the continent’s edge and rising tension in the Middle East. That commitment is not easily unwound, and it is backed by alliance obligations as well as by the government’s own security outlook. But the protesters have identified the one argument that can make defence spending unpopular: when household budgets are under strain, every euro spent on armaments is a euro that voters can picture being spent on something else. The government’s €175 million fuel aid package and the proposed €2,500 bonus for under-30s are, in this light, attempts to answer the same argument in miniature — targeted relief that does not touch the larger spending choice. Whether that is enough depends on whether voters see the two as separate questions or as the same one.

Meloni’s two-track response: concessions and crackdown

Meloni’s handling of the unrest so far has been a study in political balancing. On the one side, the fuel aid package and the youth bonus in the draft 2027 budget are genuine concessions, aimed at the groups most visibly on the streets. On the other, the toughened public-gathering laws, the eased restrictions on detaining minors, the 500 extra troops in Milan and the sanctions threat against transport workers are a clear signal that disruption will carry a cost.

The logic is that of a government trying to separate legitimate grievance from disorder: help for those who protest peacefully, punishment for those who smash windows, in Meloni’s own phrase. The danger is that the two tracks blur in practice. “Preventative” arrests before a march, a water cannon in Turin and threats against striking transport workers can easily be read by the other side as intimidation rather than order-keeping, and each such episode hands the movement fresh evidence for its claim that the government answers dissent with force. The largely peaceful character of Friday’s protests, including demonstrators extinguishing a fire started by their own side in Rome, suggests the movement understands this dynamic too — and is determined not to hand the government the images it needs to justify the crackdown.

The port as the new front line of anti-war politics

Genoa deserves particular attention. The decision by some 15,000 port workers, students and demonstrators to enter the port and block the road used by exiting trucks turned a domestic cost-of-living protest into a direct intervention in Italy’s foreign policy — specifically, in the export of Italian-made arms to conflict zones, including Israel. The dockworkers’ demand, echoed in the joint union statement with counterparts in France, Greece, Spain, Turkiye and Morocco, is that ports should not be used to move weapons, ammunition, military equipment and troops.

This is a form of protest with a long Italian history, and it is one that governments find particularly hard to manage, because it sits at the intersection of labour rights, foreign policy and public order. A government can argue about the budget in parliament; it cannot easily argue with a workforce that simply refuses to load a ship. If the Genoa action is repeated at other ports, the question of arms exports — until now a matter for ministers and diplomats — becomes a running, physical confrontation on the quayside. That is a much harder problem for Meloni than a march through a city centre, however large.

A European pattern, not an Italian exception

Finally, Friday’s events should not be read as an Italian story alone. Protests have swept through European countries including France, Spain, Belgium and Albania in recent weeks, driven by grievances including the cost of living, according to Reuters. Demonstrations in France began in late September with teachers and students protesting a lack of investment in education and poor working conditions, and have since escalated to reflect wider cost-of-living concerns, CNN reported, with the next nationwide union strike in France scheduled for 5 November.

A deepening housing crisis has triggered demonstrations across Spain and Portugal, with activists erecting encampments in the capitals’ central plazas, CNN reported. Albania has seen a series of anti-government protests, with thousands taking to the streets to highlight alleged government corruption and to demand the resignation of Prime Minister Edi Rama. And in Serbia, youth protests were effective in ousting long-standing leader Aleksandar Vučić last weekend, according to CNN.

The pattern is familiar: a cost-of-living squeeze that has been building for years, a younger generation that feels the state has stopped investing in its future, and governments that respond with a mix of targeted relief and tougher policing. Italy is the latest and largest expression of that pattern, but it is unlikely to be the last. The question for governments across the continent is whether the current mix of concessions and crackdowns can hold the line — or whether, as in Serbia, a protest movement that starts with prices and wages ends by changing who governs.

What to Watch Next

1. The Rome encampment: Protesters who marched past the Colosseum said they planned to set up tents and remain over the weekend. Whether the encampment holds — and how the authorities respond to it — will set the tone for the days ahead.
2. The 2027 budget debate: The draft budget, including the proposed €2,500 annual bonus for workers under 30, is still being discussed among the governing parties. Any watering down of the youth measures would be read on the streets as a broken promise.
3. France on 5 November: The next nationwide union strike in France will test whether the protest wave is gathering force across Europe or peaking in individual countries at different moments.
4. The ports: Whether dockworkers in Genoa and elsewhere repeat Friday’s action against arms shipments, and whether the government moves to restrict port protests, will determine whether the anti-war strand of the movement becomes its most disruptive element.
5. The USB’s next call: The grassroots union that called Friday’s strike has shown it can mobilise nationally. Its next move — and whether the larger confederations join in — will show whether this was a one-day show of strength or the start of a sustained campaign.

Sources

• Reuters — “Mass protests sweep Italy during nationwide strike”
• CNN — “Major anti-government protests sweep across Italy”
• Al Jazeera — “Italy tightens security as students, unions launch nationwide protests”
• Wikipedia — “2026 Italian unrest” (chronology of the protest wave since 16 October)
• JournalArta — “France Italy Europe Swept by Cost-of-Living: Explained”