Gilets Jaunes Act IV Tomorrow

Tomorrow the Yellow Vest rebellion in France stages "Act IV."

Macron has promised a major address to the nation next week. He has already capitulated on the fuel tax which sparked the uprising. Prominent Yellow Vest demands now include an increased minimum wage, a more robust retirement and Macron's resignation.

Close to 100,000 police will be on duty Saturday. It's conceivable that another violent weekend could prompt a state of emergency. Macron is running out of options. His approval rating is at 18%. He's promoting the idea that tomorrow will be violent.

Another indication of how dire things are for Macron is a story by Adam Nossiter, Paris correspondent for The New York Times. "How France’s ‘Yellow Vests’ Differ From Populist Movements Elsewhere" could have appeared in Jacobin. It's one of those rare instances where the mainstream mirrors the fringe. What makes it even more noteworthy is that Nossiter, though not as rabid in defense of the zombie neoliberal status quo as NYT's Rome bureau chief Jason Horowitz, puffed Macron shamelessly from the outset of the last presidential campaign. Now, as you can see, things have turned:

The uprising is instead mostly organic, spontaneous and self-determined. It is mostly about economic class. It is about the inability to pay the bills.

In that regard, it is more Occupy than Orban — more akin to the protests against Wall Street driven by the working poor in the United States than the race-based, flag-waving of Hungary’s increasingly authoritarian leader, Viktor Orban.

[snip]

“There’s this social distress that exists more or less everywhere,” said Marc Lazar, a specialist in Italian history at Sciences Po. “Of people who are very worried about the future, not only are they suffering, but they have profound distrust of institutions and political parties. This is what we are seeing everywhere in Europe.”

Comparing the four countries — Britain, France, Italy and the United States — Christophe Guilluy, a French geographer who has studied the demographics of the “left-behinds,” said “the sociology of the people in revolt is the same.”

“These are the people who feel endangered by the current economic model,” which doesn’t “integrate the greatest number,” he said.

[snip]

But [Macron's] base, then and now, was exceedingly small, presaging his current wide rejection by the French, not just by the Yellow Vests. He won only 24 percent of the vote in the first round of voting last year — while his opponents on the far right and far left together won over 40 percent of the vote. Those numbers have now come home to haunt Mr. Macron in a political landscape where nearly eight out of 10 French citizens no longer support him, according to a recent poll.

Occupy never went away. It has always been here since 2011. The Brexit vote got defined as primarily a response to the refugee crisis in Europe, which was less an issue of immigration and more about warfare run amok in the Middle East thanks to United States; but the Brexit vote had just as much to do with the Brussels-backed, German-enforced regime of neoliberal austerity as it did immigration. Now Briton Leavers are waking up to the fact that the people in charge of Brexit have no intention of working towards equality in a new Little England.

I have been telling people that the events in France and England offer a ray of sunshine as we head into winter. Though we seem to be hurtling back to the medieval, with hostage-taking of rival economic royals, the dialectic is churning forward away from zombie neoliberalism.