The movement filling France’s streets is not one movement at all. It is a coalition, and its parts have different histories, different organisations and different ideas about what victory looks like. It grew from initial student discontent, drew in trade unions, and now includes yellow vest activists, known for their high visibility jackets and mass demonstrations against economic pressures including high fuel costs. On Saturday, unions called nationwide demonstrations to denounce the high cost of living and public services, and the interior ministry deployed 70,000 police in response. The coalition’s strength is its size. Its weakness is that it has no single leadership with whom a government can negotiate a settlement.
What holds the coalition together
What holds the coalition together is not a programme but a grievance: the feeling that life has become more expensive while public services have become thinner, and that the government is not listening. Students feel it in housing and job prospects. Union members feel it in wages that do not keep pace with prices and in services that are stretched. Yellow vest activists feel it in fuel costs and in the daily expense of living outside major cities, where a car is not a luxury but a necessity. Those grievances overlap enough to fill the same streets on the same Saturday, but they do not add up to a single set of demands, and that is why the movement can mobilise massively while struggling to say, in one sentence, what would make it stop.
What the coalition means for October 31
Interior Minister Laurent Nunez said on Monday that authorities expect further disturbances during demonstrations planned for October 31, and that the huge police presence on Saturday prevented a repeat of violence seen nine days earlier. A coalition without a single leadership is harder to police, because there is no one to call to agree a route, a timetable or a code of conduct, and harder to negotiate with, because any concession to one part may not satisfy the others. It is also harder to exhaust, because when one part tires, another can take its place on the streets. The government’s challenge is therefore not only to manage October 31, but to find a way to address a grievance shared by students, workers and rural motorists alike, without pretending that a single policy can satisfy a coalition that has never agreed, among itself, on what it wants most.
