In the 1980s Switzerland was shaken by a series of youth riots, the result of simmering discontent with what many young people felt as the suffocating weight of bourgeois culture.

The spark came when the Zürich city authorities decided to allocate a large subsidy to the local opera house. A group calling itself the Red Factory Action Group clashed with police, at a protest gathering to demand premises for alternative, non-commercial youth culture. Shop windows were smashed and cars burnt. The demand for Autonomous Youth Centers (AJZ) became one of the key slogans of the revolt which spread across Switzerland.

There were riots through the 80s in larger Swiss cities: 1980 in Zurich and Lausanne, in 1982 and 1987 in Bern, in 1988 in Basel.