Political Connections and Organisational Stability: Party Factionalism and its Effects on School Student Unions’ Cohesion in Italy and France

Students of secondary education have been active in social movements in each corner of the planet, representing a relevant constituency for political recruitment and organising. While studies on the younger components of social mobilisations are scarce, there is a critical lack of literature on the specific organisational features that school student organisations have between one mobilisation and the other. Also the presence of students in social movement coalitions and alliances has been overlooked, despite the presence of learners in mobilisations is recurrent in history. Analysing the French “syndicats lycéens” and the Italian “sindacati studenteschi” in the decade 2014-2025, this study focuses on highly political – but independent – school student organisations that persist mobilisation waves, maintain a leftist “militant” political culture and that can develop stronger or weaker connections with political parties. In both national cases, the roots of self-organised school student unions lay in the ground of party political organising, often as a way to maintain a radical approach to politics while claiming forms of independence from the world of political parties. Which is the impact of stronger or weaker party connections on the stability of these organisations? How do these linkages look like in the specific context of secondary education of these two countries? Far from a perspective seeing the adults/parties as instructors/teachers and the school students/unions as followers/learners, the study will unveil the agency of school student activists in shaping the relationships with these powerful potential partners. Party factionalism is seen as a potential source of cleavages within the student organisations, especially in years of political instability within the left, as the ones that followed the years of neoliberal reform in the 2010s in both countries. To reach an understanding of the effects of these fractures on the stability of the organisations and on the persistence of practices and cultural features, this study relies on a qualitative analysis of interviews of school student leaders, accompanied by the study of documents produced by the organisations and by the one of media releases (including social media). The observation of union gatherings and protests is added to the picture, trying to collect data in an exhaustive manner, given the absence of academic sources on these forms of organising and the limited coverage granted by mainstream media.