Journalist Ollie Richardson reflects on whether the protesters will achieve their goals or the movement will lose its popularity should violence breaks out again.
Sputnik: Will the latest Yellow Vest protests be enough to make President Emmanuel Macron cave in over his economic reforms?
Ollie Richardson: The unfortunate truth is that Emmanuel Macron has a very firm grip on the media space in France, and the easiest way to control and govern a country, is to simply control the media space; especially in today’s conditions where technology has much improved.
The country’s largest television station is owned by someone who is very close to Macron, and the channel has demonised the Yellow Vest Movement from the very beginning, and tried to present them as barbarians who just smash things, and who just want to bring chaos to the lives of people, so in this sense Macron is not too worried about the actions that happen every Saturday.
This has reached such a level where people can be illegally shot in the eye with a rubber bullet, and ordinary people who are not protesting sit on the sofa, and watch the biased reports about incidents like this, which are described as a minor injury, for example losing and eye or losing a hand from a grenade explosion, and they don’t mind; they see it as a good thing, because they are made to believe that these so-called evil protesters are just troublemakers, so there’s an aspect hereof dehumanisation.
Sputnik: Does the French political system need an overhaul in order to quell discontent amongst the public?
Ollie Richardson: There an inherent oligarchic system that really controls France and is imposed by the EU. What that means is that the state budget; which is obviously replenished buy people’s taxes, is treated by the so-called elite like a feeding trough, and this means that as the population increases, the amount that the oligarchy can embezzle from this feeding trough becomes less, and so gradually what the oligarchy does is reduces and cuts services to optimise the amount of funds they can take for themselves, and this is done with the aim of reducing the population, this is an economic genocide.
The strike today is dominated more by the CGT Labour union, which is not really a threat to Emmanuel Macron, because they do peaceful protests that are sanctioned by the police, and they just go home and that’s it, the Yellow Vests have a different approach, shall we say outside the framework of what is deemed peaceful by society, but in reality it is simply a government that leaves people with no choice but to perhaps be less peaceful, and be more forceful.
Sputnik: Is Macron any worse than his recent predecessors as French President?
Ollie Richardson: Macron was put into power by the majority of votes, so that means that people today who put on Yellow Vests and protest, they actually voted for Macron because they believed the media campaigns that were against Marine Le Pen to demonise her, and now perhaps they see what a mistake it was, so in this sense he’s not really much different to his predecessors like Hollande and Sarkozy, because they vote for these people, and later become unhappy with them, because they don’t have an understanding yet of how the system works.
As long as there is this modern version of feudalism in place; nothing can change, and that’s why the Yellow Vests want a referendum system where people can participate in the political system and have a say at every stage of decision making, and it’s not just one person sat at the top who dictates to all the shall we say proletariat, how things must be, so Macron is not too much different to those who came before him, but if we compare him to people like Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin, Nicolas Maduro or Bashar al-Assad, then Macron has a very low approval rating in general.
