The Yellow Vests are in employment, but they struggle to make ends meet. They mostly are middle-aged, and living in rural or peri-urban areas. Women are quite well represented among protestors, but the movement is overwhelmingly white. The Yellow Vests is indeed a Franco-French story which has failed to attract the populations from an ethnic background who are essentially concentrated in urban areas.
The movement’s most fundamental characteristic is its loathing of representative democracy: the Yellow Vests despise professional politicians and describe them as ‘corrupt’ and ‘incompetent’. They also want to stay away from left parties and unions. In short, they only believe in themselves to carry out major social and political transformations. But how can one achieve such ambitious objectives without looking for allies and working out concrete political outcomes (for instance, an alliance with organised progressive forces or taking part in elections) ?
Two concentric circles
The Yellow Vests embrace the highly fashionable – if simplistic – populist viewpoint according to which society is divided between ‘the people’ (the large majority of citizens) and ‘the elites’ (the very small, 1% fraction of the dominant classes).
The apparent loathing of professional politicians and political representation has not prevented some Yellow Vests from appointing themselves ‘spokespeople’ of the movement: Priscillia Ludosky (who started the online petition in May 2018), Éric Drouet or Maxime Nicolle have even become media stars and household names, often for the wrong reasons. (Drouet and Nicolle have propagated far right propaganda and conspiracy theories on social media)
When two splinter groups decided to run a list of candidates at the last European elections, they were immediately ostracised by the rest of the movement. The results were derisory: one list received 0.7% of the share of the vote and the other 0.5%. When they voted, a majority of Yellow Vests supporters chose Marine Le Pen’s far right National Rally.
Is it surprising? Qualitative surveys show that there are in fact two concentric circles of Yellow Vest protestors: the core – which takes to the street on a weekly basis – is economically progressive and culturally rather tolerant. This is the public face of the movement. But there is more to it than this ‘left-wing’ component. A larger circle of supporters, less active in the movement, is motivated by the defence of specific material interests (rise on fuel, speed limit, curbing immigration). The Yellow Vests’ anti-system and anti-establishment rhetoric combined with those material concerns was therefore largely compatible with Le Pen’s anti-EU, anti-migrants and anti-elite discourse.
Now what?
In short, if the movement has put forward very decent proposals on the social and economic side of the argument, it has failed to appeal to the masses of salaried workers (blue and white-collar workers), as well as the unemployed, the young and racialised populations. The reasons for the eventual failure of the movement are clear today: the idea of a popular rebellion against an arrogant and right-wing president may have been a romantic idea to most French for a short period of time, but it did not suffice to form a real political movement.
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