Two years on, (some) Yellow Jacket supporters no longer hate Macron

 

LETTER FROM NORMANDY

Two years on, (some) Yellow Jacket supporters no longer hate Macron

 

The anti-Macron anger that drove the movement is dissipating in rural France.

 

BY JOHN LICHFIELD

November 17, 2020 4:00 am

https://www.politico.eu/article/two-years-on-some-yellow-jacket-supporters-no-longer-hate-macron/

 

John Lichfield is a former foreign editor of the Independent and was the newspaper’s Paris correspondent for 20 years.

 

CALVADOS, France — Two years ago, in November 2018, the anti-establishment protest movement known as the gilets jaunes exploded across France. For over a year, protesters — angry at Emmanuel Macron’s fuel-tax policies and his presidency more generally — would cause serious disruption, with weekly mass protests and traffic blocks, and dominate political debate. 

 

That original revolt fizzled out more than a year ago. The movement, hijacked by its most extreme members, now survives (barely) as something urban and anti-capitalist. It has become a revolt by people in a perpetual state of revolt.

 

 

 

I live in rural Normandy, one of the original Yellow Jackets hotspots. Two years ago, more than half the cars here displayed yellow hi-viz jackets in their windscreens — the badge of the Yellow Jackets movement.

 

In those first months, I had many conversations with active gilets jaunes on local roundabouts, which they routinely occupied, observing their journey from exuberant indignation to petty quarrels and then disillusionment. I also spoke to neighbors who never spoke about politics. They were, at first, big fans of the Yellow Jackets and united in their disapproval — even detestation — of Macron.

 

That seems to have changed in the past few weeks, amid the twin crises of the coronavirus pandemic and Islamist terrorism.

 

The original Yellow Jackets movement was a collective of various grievances. Everyone, from active protesters to passive supporters, had different qualms. In that way, the political geography of the original Yellow Jackets matched in many respects the political geography of Brexit in Britain, or Trumpism in the United States.

 

The protests were an expression of a fracture between rural, or outer suburban France, and the France of a dozen or more large metropolitan areas. They revealed a resentment and sense of threatened identity in la France profonde that was both justified and absurdly exaggerated by conspiracy theories propagated online.

 

If protesters didn’t agree on what was wrong, they agreed about who to blame: Macron.

 

He was arrogant, remote, unfeeling, they said. He was the archetype of the pointy-headed, over-educated product of the finishing schools of the French political elite. He was the kind of condescending, know-it-all young man who used to stand behind the president. And now he was the president.

 

That anti-Macron anger appears to have dissipated — or at least lost some its animating force.

 

Before France went into its second coronavirus lockdown, I visited one of my neighbors. An original Yellow Jackets supporter, she is in her mid-70s. I will call her Henriette.

 

To my surprise, she raised the subject of politics.

 

“I’ve changed my mind about Macron,” she said. “I think he’s changed too. He speaks differently now. He is more modest. He is trying to do his best for us in the epidemic. He’s got things wrong but he’s done a lot for people.”

 

“When Macron arrived, it was as if he thought he knew everything,” she added. “Now with COVID he’s had to admit he’s made mistakes. I think it’s made him closer to people.”

 

Her daughters say the same thing, according to Henriette. “They’ve been furloughed from their jobs but are receiving money from the state. They used to detest Macron. Now they say, ‘Yes, it’s bad here but it could have been much worse. Look at what’s happening in other countries.’”

 

How typical is Henriette? In some ways, not at all.

 

She follows politics and current affairs closely but in an old-fashioned way: She watches the TV news and reads Ouest France, the excellent regional newspaper that circulates in Brittany and the southern part of Normandy.

 

She is not on Facebook and does not own a computer or a mobile phone. As such, she is sheltered from anti-establishment anger and fantastic conspiracy theories about COVID-19 that spread on social media as relentlessly as the virus itself. (These have been sewn together in recent days — as a kind of conspiracy “best of” — in a lengthy French film called “Hold-up” that claims COVID-19 was invented by (guess who) the global elites.)

 

But Henriette’s change of heart reflects a broader shift among people who supported or sympathized with the Yellow Jackets movement in its initial form — and now feel they have less reason to mistrust an embattled president.

 

Another neighbor, Michel, 84, used to drive around with a hi-viz jacket in his windscreen and sometimes votes for the far right. He also said that he had warmed to Macron (a little).

 

 

“He always seemed to be talking to himself or for himself and his chums in the banks. Now, finally, he’s talking to us,” he said. Still, he added, “with all the shit that’s going to fall in the next year — more deaths, all the job losses — I don’t have much hope for him.”

 

In recent days, Macron has seen a boost in opinion polls, reflecting, perhaps, what I’ll call the “Henriette effect.” The second coronavirus lockdown and the two terrorist attacks last month have created a brief sense of national unity.

 

In an Ifop-Fiducial poll for Paris Match last week, Macron’s approval rating jumped by 6 percentage points to 49 percent. Among respondents over 65, the jump is especially notable: 16 percentage points.

 

Such figures — which are very high for a French president in the second half of his mandate — will not last. Vaccine or no vaccine, France faces a miserable start to 2021, with potentially vast job losses in entertainment, retail and aviation.

 

And yet, the French, especially the older French, like their politicians to be marinated in adversity — even in failure. Some, not all, of the detestation of Macron two years ago came from the fact that he seemed so insolently young and untested but still thought he knew all the answers.

 

Now, as Macron struggles to grapple with a number of grave crises at once, he has become — for some people, certainly not all — a figure to rally around, even to admire.

 

The next presidential election, in April 2022, is a year and a half away. No French president has been elected for a second term since 2002 (and then arguably only by accident). The odds are stacked against Macron.

 

He was elected in 2017 as champion of a young, metropolitan France. To win a second term, he will have to re-mobilize at least part of that electorate. He will also have to hold on to his new, maybe fragile fan club among older and rural voters — and find ways to make the “Henriette effect” endure.