Viva the yellow vests, viva!

ANNIVERSARY: STRUGGLING FRENCH TAKE UP FIGHT

Rebellion rattled Macron – and protesters want to do it again next month.

The only traces of the sixmonth battle waged at the Montabon roundabout in northwest France are the French flag, a luminous yellow vest hoisted on a pole high above the ground and a few empty food cans rusting in the mud.

This windswept junction in the rural Sarthe region was the local rallying point in the nationwide campaign against fuel taxes, which began in November 2018 and quickly ballooned into a fullscale revolt.

In an orchard next to the road, struggling workers, pensioners, job seekers, drifters and dreamers erected a wooden shelter. There, they gathered to share a meal and strategise, in an area squeezed by factory closures.

They celebrated Christmas, New Year and wedding anniversaries together, creating one of the most enduring of the hundreds of roadside camps set up by the yellow vests to protest policies seen as skewed toward welloff city-dwellers.

“It was like Noah’s ark,” said David Bruzzi, a 49-yearold mechanic who was one of the camp’s leaders.

“It wasn’t just about beating up on [President Emmanuel] Macron,” Bruzzi said during a weekly gathering with a handful of other “veterans” on the fruit farm.

“It was about looking after people in the area and filling shopping bags” for hard-up protesters, he said.

This weekend, thousands of yellow vests will return to the roadside to mark the first anniversary of a rebellion which badly rattled the government, forcing Macron to revise his ambitious reform agenda.

Others will travel to Paris,

Bordeaux and other big cities to take part in the 52nd straight week of street protests, several of which ended in scenes of looting and arson that made headlines worldwide.

Whether the anniversary can breathe new life into a movement whose turnout has shrunk from 282 000 protesters on November 17, 2018, to just a few thousand nationwide, remains to be seen.

Around the world, participants in leaderless revolts from Hong Kong to Chile have cited the yellow vests as a source of inspiration.

But in France, the movement’s gains are widely questioned by its own rank-and-file. Most of them dismiss the €10 billion (R165 billion) package for the working poor and pensioners announced by Macron last year as “peanuts”.

About 600 yellow vest delegates gathered in Montpellier last week, where they backed trade union calls for mass strike action on December 5. – AFP

Macron told Time magazine the yellow vests ‘had been good to me’