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 are ill-served by public transportation, the added expense has been brutal. It has also inflamed social resentment, the sense that the ruling classes and their wealthy urban supporters take the rest of the country for fools, “milking cows” for the rich to grow ever fatter off of. In a homemade Facebook video that has been viewed more than six million times, Jacline Mouraud, an accordionist from Brittany who has become a de facto spokesperson for the movement, vented her frustration with an exasperated, folksy refrain: “Mais qu’est-ce que vous faites avec le pognon des français?” (“But what are you doing with French people’s money”). In addition to the gas tax, she objected to new rules for car inspections and the transformation of the countryside into a “forest of radars.” Many of the group’s early actions consisted simply of blocking traffic on roads and at roundabouts. [...]
According to some polls, around eighty per cent of French people are sympathetic to the gilets jaunes. When the questions are worded more precisely, the number drops to around forty-five per cent, roughly the same proportion of the electorate that supported the extreme-left leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon (19.5%) and the extreme-right leader Marine Le Pen (21.3%) in the first round of the 2017 Presidential race. Interestingly, the gilets jaunes have been able to amass support without putting particularly impressive numbers of people on the streets. Even as physical participation in the movement has declined—from almost three hundred thousand people to a hundred a sixty-six thousand in the course of three weekends—its power has increased. (Can there ever be fewer of a thing online?) A fourth Saturday of disruption is planned for this weekend. [...]
The European Parliamentary elections are coming up in May. Macron knows that they are referendum not only on him but also on the values of globalism, centrism, and environmentalism, of which he has positioned himself as an international defender. One of the garbled but loud messages of the gilets-jaunes movement may be that it isn’t the street that Macron has to master, it’s the information highway. Macron successfully fended off hackers’ attempts to discredit his campaign on the eve of the Presidential election, but it’s hard not to wonder whether Facebook populism is finally coming for France.
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