I don't see any evidence of "hurting people for no reason" in that video. Do you see the large, unbroken, glass windows on both sides of the street?

The vast majority of the protesting is now peaceful. The protestors quickly realized the breaking and looting was working against them in the media, and in court cases around protest bans.

Here is an article from the BBC on Thursday's protests. They were the largest so far, until yesterday. The BBC only found a few small examples of breaking: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ckx2qzv835pgo

Source: I live in Montpellier. I've been in the peaceful marches and walked through the tear gas, photographing.

Regular Tuesday in France

Ah. I hadn't bargained on them just being unfathomably evil and beyond redemption.

If you're talking election, sound gun or not they would have won anyway, people in general were dissatisfied with Vucic and student list was pretty much the first opposition that was loud enough and marketed themselves well enough, and to be clear is only tangentially related to the student movement.

People on lemmy who only hear about the protests now from tabloids are giving it too much credit, it was a mess both internally and externally, a mess that's also been dead before the recent election for at least a year