The Yellow Vest protests are increasingly disrupting France:
France may be forced to declare a state of emergency after a day of carnage in Paris, amid calls to send in the army to quell an outburst of civil unrest. Violent protesters occupied the centre of Paris yesterday and torched cars, smashed windows with clubs and axes and clashed with riot police firing tear gas and water cannon on the Champs-Elysees, in France’s worst urban rioting in more than a decade.
The ‘yellow vest’ protests, which began as a rebellion against fuel prices but has expanded into weeks of civil unrest, spread across the country yesterday and ended with 133 people injured, including 23 police officers, and 412 arrested last night.
Today the French government said it would consider imposing a state of emergency to end the violence, as President Emmanuel Macron visited the Arc de Triomphe and vowed to bring the rioters to justice.
I can’t help but observe that the protesters have clearly learned the lesson of GamerGate on the one hand and the Fake Right on the other. No leaders means no points of weakness the government can seek to buy off, assimilate, or destroy.
The French government has faced difficulties dealing with the protesters as the movement has no real leadership and has not aligned itself with any political organisation…. On Friday, the government tried – mostly in vain – to talk to representatives of the movement. Eight were invited to meet Prime Minister Edouard Philippe but only two turned up, and one walked out after being told he could not invite TV cameras in to broadcast the encounter live to the nation.
Notice that the French government’s first response was to summon the leaders and attempt to communicate with them and coopt them. But there is no need for any communications, as all the protesters need to do is keep up the pressure for a few weeks and the Macron government will fall. And that, I would guess, is their primary objective, since no one in France, on the Left or the Right, actually supports the feckless globalist tool.