France saw a fifth weekend of protests by defiant gilets jaunes (pronounced jillae june) (yellow vests) who ignored government calls to stay home following this week’s attack on Strasbourg’s Christmas market.
The gilets jaunes take their name from the yellow safety vests that French drivers are required to keep in their cars. The group is a complicated phenomenon, first of all because it has no defined leader.
The movement began in protest of Macron’s economic policies, particularly the increase in fuel taxes (four euro cents on the litre for unleaded gas, seven euro cents for diesel) that was introduced, in January, to help curb carbon emissions. Along with the hike in taxes, the price of gas has risen dramatically, meaning that French drivers, this fall, found themselves paying as much as 1.59 euros per litre (six dollars per gallon), an increase of seventeen per cent since this time last year for users of unleaded gas, and twenty-three per cent for diesel.
For many households, particularly in rural and suburban areas that don’t have public transportation, the added expense has been brutal.
In Paris hundreds gathered at the Champs-Elysées and at the Opera House though the authorities said the numbers were well down on previous weeks.
At both sites, demonstrators found themselves facing a massive show of strength from the security services. Protesters were searched as riot police, gendarmes with armored vehicles, mounted police and plainclothes police encircled, refusing to allow them to disperse en masse down spur roads.
It has been a long week for Emmanuel Macron who, hours after trying to defuse the most explosive crisis of his 18 months in office by making concessions to the gilets jaunes, was dealing with a suspected terrorist attack on Strasbourg’s celebrated Christmas market.
On Monday, Macron, accused by gilets jaunes of being arrogant and out of touch, announced a package of concessions including a rise in the minimum wage in a televised address to the nation.
French protests have often seemed like a dance between demonstrators and police – direct action has a long and cherished history here. But these weekly confrontations between people and state are different.
Not led by any union or political party, the “yellow vest” protests have unleashed the worst civil disorder Paris has seen for decades.
Four people have been killed, many hundreds injured and billions of euros of damage inflicted on the country’s urban centres.
The French government at one point warned of “serious violence” and “fears for democracy and its institutions”, with at least one protest spokesman calling on people to march on the Elysee Palace, the home of the president.
And yet the power of this movement lies, in the quiet support of what polls suggest is more than half the country.
President Emmanuel Macron came to power vowing to face down protesters and drive through long-postponed economic reforms.
For the first 18 months of his presidency, that’s exactly what he did – forcing through changes in the labour law against a backdrop of noisy public protests, and pushing past broad, union-led demonstrations on railway reform.
This current crisis erupted – not over a major issue – but rather over a fiscal detail in the budget for next year, a routine rise in eco-taxes on fuel.
It wasn’t even a policy that the current government had made.
The commitment to annual tax rises on fuel – and especially diesel – in order to fund eco-friendly projects had been part of the previous government’s legacy to Macron.
But it was enough to spark a small local rebellion – a handful of motorists started displaying their regulation hi-vis jackets, or gilets jaunes, in the windscreens of their cars and posting their actions on Facebook.
Now a movement created on social media, with no recognised leadership, has forced President Macron into concessions that were unthinkable a few weeks ago. How? Because this not a confrontation about fuel taxes, or any one issue.
It’s about power
It’s no accident that cars were the spark that ignited this anger. Not needing one has become a status symbol in France.
Those in city centres have a wealth of public transport to choose from, but you need to be rich enough to live in the centre of Paris or Marseille or Bordeaux, and most people are not.
“Economic growth happens in big globalised cities, but the working classes no longer live there,” says Christophe Guilluy, an independent researcher specialising in human geography. “That’s a major change.
For the first time in history, they don’t live where wealth and jobs are created. They live in a ‘rural France’, characterised by weak economic growth, high unemployment and high anxiety.”
“This economic model creates enormous wealth,” he continues. “But it creates it in a concentrated and unequal way. Since the 1980s, what we are seeing is a weakening of all categories of the middle class.”
Without a car, those in France who have been priced out of the big cities struggle to get to work, take their children to school and even to shop for groceries.
Fuel prices in France are roughly the same as in Germany or the UK – and French diesel prices generally lie somewhere in between its two neighbours.
But there is a more general sense of unfairness – a feeling that the struggling middle class are being asked to shoulder more than their fair share of the burden, while France’s millionaires have seen their top rate of tax slashed. And the pain was felt especially keenly this year, because rises in the global oil price had already made fuel more expensive.
In September this year, the government announced its planned increase in the eco-taxes levied on petrol and, particularly, on diesel.
Shortly afterwards, the first motorists began showing off their hi-vis jackets in the windscreens of their cars, and Jacline Mouraud, a hypnotherapist from Brittany, published a video on social media saying that motorists were being “hunted”.
Months earlier, Priscillia Ludosky, the manager of an online cosmetics company from just outside Paris, had launched a petition on the website Change.org calling for petrol prices to be lowered.
After the announcement on tax rises, it really began to take off, quickly gathering a million signatures – but still, she says, there’s been no response from the government.
“We are not understood, we are not heard, our opinions are not sought on the big decisions,” she explains. “I get the impression that when the president speaks to people in the street, he’s completely detached from reality.”
Then, in October, truck driver Eric Drouet, another initiator of the movement, suggested on Facebook the idea of a national blockage, calling on protesters around the country to block roads in their area on 17 November, obstructing and slowing traffic in order to get the government’s attention.
About 290,000 people took part. The gilets jaunes movement had begun.
“The movement started around a tax rise,” says Christophe Guilluy, “but I think it’s simply a pretext, in the same way that Brexit is not fundamentally a confrontation with Europe, but first and foremost a way for people to say ‘we exist’.
“In France, people are using the gilets jaunes as a way to say ‘we exist’ to the elites, to the political class, to those who have forgotten about them for the past 20 years, for the simple reason that they no longer live in the same place.”
The irony, for Emmanuel Macron, is that he came to power promising to rebuild trust in politics, especially among those struggling to thrive in the new, globalised economy.
The reforms he promised were designed, he said, to create wealth in order that it could be shared with those who needed it most.
It was a policy that aimed to liberalize and protect, but many in France feel that the social protection for workers has fallen short compared with the liberal reforms enjoyed by businesses.
President Macron pushed through reforms where previous presidents had feared to tread – reducing the power of the unions in workplace relations, ending the special benefits enjoyed by railway workers, and making it easier for companies to hire and fire staff.
He also ended the wealth tax on all assets apart from property, meaning a 70% cut in the tax for France’s millionaires.
It was meant to boost investment in the economy, but it was seen by many poorer voters as further proof that this former banker-turned-president was still primarily a friend of business, not of the poor working and middle class.
France’s Public Policy Institute recently published a review of who had gained and lost under Macron’s presidency so far. It found that the buying power of the poorest in society had slightly shrunk, while those in the economic middle had slightly gained. But the biggest winners were the richest 1%.
This sense of unfairness emerges time and again in the graffiti that has appeared on walls and monuments in Paris. Much of it calls for the resignation of Macron, or simply the “fall of the regime”.
On the Republic’s famous monument at Republique, someone has changed the revolutionary right of “universal suffrage” to read “universal suffering”.
If the roots of protesters’ frustration lie in the big economic shifts of the 1980s, how far did Macron himself encourage it to bloom into open opposition?
“In the last election, many people voted to change their situation and they still find themselves here, so they’ve started to get frustrated,” says protester Antonin Olles. “They’ve realised that those who govern them don’t know what real life is like – for them, poverty is just a set of numbers.”
“We want a second French revolution,” Olles says. “We want to show the rest of Europe that the people have some power.”
Now here is something to think about.
France has an entirely different political system compared to ours.
Their President serves for 5 years and like ours is limited to 2 terms.
However, here in the US, we have 2 major political parties, Democrats and Republicans.
This is not true in France. In the election that brought President Macron to power, there were 5 political parties running candidates for President.
- The Left-wing centred around the French Socialist Party
- The Europe Ecology Party known as The Greens (EELV)
- The Radical Party of the far Left including Communists.
- The Right-wing is centred aroundLes Républicains (The Republican) party – until 2015 called the Union for a Popular Movement (UMP)
- The New Centre Party of Macron who ran on a platform of being neither right nor left.
In our American 2 party system we are seeing tremendous controversy. Two camps if you will.
Those who fully support Trump, and the Never Trumpers.
With a two party system a president will always have the support of roughly half of the people. This makes it hard to launch a revolution against either party that occupies the white house.
Now think about France. With 5 political factions, even if you have a 25% of the people support you, that leaves 75% to oppose you.
That is what has happened with the gilets jaunes movement. Macron is not fighting one opposing party, he is fighting 4.
The other 4 parties have put their differences aside and all come together to oppose Macron.
Personally, I don’t see how Macron will survive this.
So let me ask you folks, are the members of gilets jaunes justified in launching their protests?
Living here in the Ozarks we have to depend on our cars to go to work, buy groceries, and take our kids to school.
If gas went to $6.00/gallon to fund improvements for St. Louis and Kansas City, would you be willing to pay?
If not, would you be willing to put aside your differences and join hands with an opposing political party to put an end to it?