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Yellow Vests take to the streets for 16th week

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PARIS: Demonstrators from the Yellow Vest movement took to the streets of Paris and other French cities on Saturday for the sixteenth consecutive week of protests. Public broadcaster France Info reported that several hundred protesters set off from the Arc de Triomphe for what was billed as a 12-kilometre march through the west and south of the capital. Broadcaster BFMTV showed calm protests in several provincial cities such as Nantes and Bordeaux as well. The largely leaderless movement, known for the yellow safety bibs that have become its symbol and uniform, began in November in opposition to planned fuel price hikes, later scrapped.


It has since raised broader demands for lower taxes and cost of living, more direct democracy, and the resignation of President Emmanuel Macron.


Protests have repeatedly ended in clashes with police in Paris and other cities. Council of Europe Human Rights Commissioner Dunja Mijatovic, in a report earlier this week criticising the police response as well as violence by protesters, cited government figures indicating that 2,060 demonstrators and 1,325 members of the security forces had been injured in total.


However, the Facebook group “Yellow Vests Act 16: Insurrection” is calling on demonstrators to “go back to the movement’s roots” with the “spontaneous” approach that “scared the government” with undeclared protests at unauthorised sites in November and December.


Demonstrations are also planned in cities throughout France, including Marseille, Nice, Bordeaux, Strasbourg, Nantes and Toulouse. In the northeastern city of Lille, protest organisers have called on Yellow Vests throughout the region — as well as in neighbouring countries such as Belgium and Germany to converge on the city.


“The fight is international,” says a statement on the Facebook event page for the Lille demonstrations.


In Lyon, protest conveners are planning a “black march”, in which demonstrators will turn up dressed in black as a “symbol of mourning” for the movement, to warn against a hypothetical future in which it is destined to “become obscurantist” and the object of “contempt” because of activists “not acting together”.


Act 16 comes after Éric Drouet, Priscilla Ludosky and Maxime Nicolle, Yellow Vest activists who captured public attention with viral social media posts in November, have called for the mass mobilisation of protesters on the following Saturdays, March 9 and — especially — March 16, the date when Macron’s ‘grand debate’ finishes.


For his part, Macron repeated his requests for a “return to calm” on Friday, lamenting the demonstrations’ “intolerable” violence.


He launched the ‘grand debate’ on January 15 — in which every French person is supposed to be able to air their grievances — as a response to the popular uprising that emerged in opposition to proposed fuel tax hikes in November, before becoming a more amorphous movement calling for a wide variety of policy changes.


The movement represented one of the worse crisis to hit Macron’s term of office since he came to power in 2017.


Violent clashes that have accompanied each demonstration as well as the inability of the movement to unite around one common cause or leader have led to a diminishing turnout for the regular protests.


French people largely support the protest movement. — Agencies


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