Macron Should Take a Page From Obama to Deal With Protests
The Occupy movement was the U.S. president’s Yellow Vest moment. He found the right balance between understanding and firmness.
It never came to this in the U.S.
Photographer: Theo Legendre/AFP/Getty Images
The violence of the Yellow Vest protests in France forced President Emmanuel Macron to promise costly concessions. This raises the question of how a government, and a national leader, should deal with a Facebook revolution of that kind. There are are plenty of precedents, both successful and disastrous.
On Tuesday, President Vladimir Putin used the Yellow Vests to justify the arrest last week of 77-year-old human rights activist Lev Ponomaryov for endorsing a call for an unsanctioned rally. “We don’t want events like those in Paris, where people pick stones out of the pavement and burn everything and then the country plunges into a state of emergency, do we?” Putin told his Human Rights Council. Putin’s answer to the Russian version of the Yellow Vests — supporters of the anti-corruption activist Alexey Navalny are probably the closest analogy — is to harass the movement’s leaders and put them behind bars for several weeks every time they organize a protest without permission. The level of police violence at the rallies themselves has varied, but it has rarely been so high as to be a deterrent.