Since mid-November, thousands of people have donned their “hi-vis” yellow vests and met at road intersections across France to express their discontent with President Emmanuel Macron’s policies. This gilets jaunes movement was initially triggered by the fight against a rise in fuel taxes, as well as the buildup of social problems among the popular classes in rural areas and the continual weakening of local democracy. But its demands rapidly grew wider in scope.

One first kind of demand concerned the improvement of living standards, starting from an increase in the minimum wage. Others sought a deeper democratization of French society, expressing a powerful desire for better representation. For the first time since Emmanuel Macron’s election in May 2017, he and his government doubted themselves and retreated in the face of a nebulous movement. A movement that seemed not only difficult to get a handle on but also to be aggregating new elements — including social movements in the suburbs of the big cities — as well as consolidating and radicalizing as the weeks went on.

Given the mainly material dimensions of this phenomenon, one might have expected that the big union federations would have seized the opportunity to mount a challenge to the authorities such as they have struggled to build in many years. But since the outset of the movement, the main union leaders have been openly wary of the protests: Philippe Martinez, general secretary of the CGT, said on November 16 (at the beginning of the movement) that it would be “impossible for the CGT to march alongside the Front National.” And if the CFDT leader Laurent Berger recognized that the gilets jaunes were standing up for “a bunch of subjects we’ve long been talking about,” in the same breath he hit out at “those people on the roadblocks who have never been involved in anything and now say that all those who’ve been engaged for years are useless.”