French yellow vest protesters hit streets for 21st weekend

The grassroots yellow vest movement began with the outcry over fuel tax hikes, and got its name because demonstrators wore the fluorescent safety vests motorists are required to carry in France. (File Photo By Thomas Bresson – Own work, CC BY 4.0)

PARIS – Protesters from the yellow vest movement took to the streets of France on Saturday for a 21st straight weekend, with thousands marching across Paris and a group briefly invading the busy beltway around the capital.

Riot police rounded up the protesters on the beltway and fired a round of tear gas on the street above, apparently to stop others from entering a ramp onto the road.

At another of Saturday’s numerous protests around the country, police fired tear gas in Rouen, in Normandy, in a showdown with protesters after fires were set in garbage cans and elsewhere.

The Interior Ministry reported initial attendance figures that put the number of protesters in Paris at midday at 3,100, compared to the 1,800 who were counted a week earlier at the same time, French media reported. Nationwide, the ministry counted 6,300 protest participants.

The number of people taking part in the yellow vest demonstrations has been dwindling since the first protests over fuel taxes in mid-November, when hundreds of thousands turned out. But the grassroots movement for social and economic justice continues to pose a challenge to President Emmanuel Macron.

“We will continue until victory. We give up nothing, because today, nothing has been obtained,” Agnes Berger, a protester from Saint Cloud, west of Paris, said. “We still have a corrupt system, an elite that governs against the people.”

Jeremy Gibon, from the suburb of Le Mesnil-Amelot, underscored protesters’ determination with his call for a radical solution that creates a “new system.”

“It’s a war of attrition,” Gibon said. “We feel if we make everything fall, we can rebuild something….It will be for us. You’ll see.”

The grassroots yellow vest movement began with the outcry over fuel tax hikes, and got its name because demonstrators wore the fluorescent safety vests motorists are required to carry in France.

The movement’s demands since have multiplied to include a people’s referendum and the restoration of a wealth tax, with increasing the buying power of the majority of France’s people a bottom line.

Approaches to maintaining order by police have evolved, as well. Paris police have fine-tuned their strategy to make officers more mobile and more proactive in countering violence like the rioting on Paris’ Champs-Elysees Avenue last month. A new police chief was appointed.

The Champs-Elysees has since been declared off-limits to protesters. One prominent figure in the leaderless movement, Eric Drouet, was among a half-dozen protesters seen in the prohibited area and issued a fine he plans to contest, Drouet’s lawyer, Kheops Lara, told French television channel LCI.

In Paris, one of two marches on Saturday went from the Place de la Republique in the east to the business district, La Defence, on the capital’s western edge. The finishing point was chosen because of its significance in the world of finance, Drouet said.

The yellow vest movement “hasn’t stopped at all,” Drouet told LCI.

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Chris Den Hond and Sylvie Corbet in Paris contributed to this report.