For 30 consecutive Saturdays, yellow vest demonstrators have taken to the streets across France, despite thousands of arrests and thousands of injuries at the hands of the police.
While the numbers of yellow vest protesters are down from their highs. Independent sources report around 20,000 people participating in demonstrations last Saturday.
The yellow vest movement began in November, protests initially began in response to tax hikes, but the movement expanded to wider outrage against the government and growing wealth inequality.
Hundreds of thousands of people mobilized across France and the movement expanded with broad popular support. The yellow vest movement quickly spread to other countries.
The yellow vest movement has been a spontaneous, self-organized social movement that has held out for half a year in spite of violent police repression and government criminilization of the protests while retaining its autonomy and resisting being co-opted by establishment political forces within France.
While the French authorities almost immediately abandoned their plans to raise fuel taxes, yellow vest activists have continued to take to the streets across France every weekend for demonstrations to express their discontent with the government. The yellow vests reject president Emmanuel Macron’s policies and demand for the Macron government to leave office.
Image adapted from: “DSC02056” by Travis Rigel Lukas Hornung is licensed under CC BY 2.0
ANARCHIMEDIA 