Yellow vests

September 23, 2020 Souwie

Popular protest, the peaceful kind, is an important part of a healthy democracy. Protest movements have changed the lives of millions, although many started with only a handful of activists. The fall of the Berlin Wall and ultimately the Iron Curtain stands out for many in recent European history. But more recently popular protest movements have increased across Europe. At De Balie, in Amsterdam, we recently heard from the leaders of the Yellow Vests in France, the Sardines in Italy, Extinction Rebellion in the UK and the Million Moments in the Czech Republic. We also heard from Demosisto in Hong Kong who are fighting for democracy in the face of strong opposition from mainland China. Do movements such as these embody the positive and very necessary side of populism and identity politics in a democracy?

The Hong Kong protest movement is now famous worldwide. Nowhere is the fight between democracy and autocracy more dramatically defined than on this small, beleaguered island in the South China Sea. A leaderless movement, like so many others, we heard from one of the long-time organisers, Wong Yik Mo, who shared their lessons for protest, based on hard-won experience. He speaks of the importance of working together as a group and helping one another.

In Hong Kong this has come in the form of provision of food, accommodation and medical attention to protesters. He also emphasises the importance of sticking to your goals, but still being flexible enough to adjust to changing events. ‘Be like water but do not kow tow!’ Know your enemy. Clearly the Chinese Communist Party is a formidable enemy to have, nevertheless, it’s important to know what you’re up against. Linked to this, is their decision to build an essentially leaderless movement in which ‘Nobody is the hero, but everyone is a hero’.

Fighting the ‘sad, bad populist politics’ of Italy – Mattia Santori of the Sardine movement

Other popular protest movements in Europe, have also chosen to take a decentralised approach to their organisation. Co-founder of Extinction Rebellion in the UK, Clare Farrell, explains that they view their approach as opting for lots of leaders rather than being leaderless. ‘We don’t want to become reliant on a single voice or too small a group of voices’ she explains.

Mattia Santori, co-founder of the Sardine movement in Italy explains that he and his flatmate, who started the movement together, initially agreed to take turns talking with the press. ‘It wasn’t easy ,we had to accept these roles as leaders’ and admits that he is pleased they are still friends! Santori explains that the movement grew out of a desire to fight against ‘the bad, sad politics in Italy, the populist politics’. The first protest took place in Bologne, Santori’s hometown, and the goal was to get 6000 ‘sardines’ into the town square to protest. ‘We don’t have economic power but we do have people power!’ he laughs.

Although the Sardines are fighting against populism in Italy, comments such as these merely highlight the populist nature of their own endeavour. Similarly, the Million Moments for Democracy movement co-founded by Benjamin Roll in Prague, stemmed from an initial desire to see the resignation of a corrupt, autocratic Prime Minister. But in time, Roll admits that they came to realise their real goal was to protect and defend democracy. ‘One of the biggest problems, is that people here don’t believe in democracy’ he explains.

‘Democracy is more than just elections’ – Benjamin Roll of Million Moments

‘Democracy is more than just elections. It’s about our everyday lives, our attitudes.’ To this end, he admits that they are in contact with the opposition parties in the Czech Republic. Their role is to encourage a deeply divided political opposition to work together and cooperate so that they can offer a clear alternative to those who are currently in power. Ultimately the Million Moments movement works to stimulate an active civil society and democratically engaged citizens.

Priscillia Ludosky, who co-founded the Yellow Vest (Giles Jaunes) movement in Paris in 2018, explains that it started with a simple desire to denounce inequalities. She began a petition requesting more transparency regarding the fuel tax. ‘It was an invitation to start a public debate’. As a result, they have been accused of being anti-climate change. But Ludosky tells us that this was an attempt by the political establishment, including the French government, to discredit a movement which has grown in power and political strength.

Like the Sardines, she agrees that, ‘we don’t have a lot of financing and therefore we need to be very smart with our choice of tools.’ She also admits that she too was initially approached by every major French political party. They tried to persuade her that the Yellow Vests should be associated with their own political agenda. But all were eschewed. ‘They are like poison for me’ says Priscillia, of the political establishment.

The missing piece in European democracy?

Do these movements see common ground between them? Would they consider working together on a pan-European or possibly a global level? Benjamin Roll sees a role for the Million Moments in a wider European context, particularly in other Eastern European countries where similar fights for democracy are currently raging. Mattia Santori believes that ‘it is our responsibility to create a trigger point for Europe’. He views movements like his and others as ‘the missing piece’ in European democracy.

Clare Farrell of Extinction Rebellion says, ‘our doors are always wide open’ to work with other popular protest movements. Their goal of having a citizen’s assembly in parliament, is based on a strong belief in the need to ‘change democracy in order to fix the problems about which we are protesting’. Wong Yik Mo of Demosisto in Hong Kong sees a clear correlation between the erosion of democracy in Europe and China’s influence, particularly over countries like Hungary and Greece. In this sense he sees much common ground between their efforts in Hong Kong and popular movements in Europe.

In spite of their differing agendas, all of these popular protest movements share a common desire to harness the power of the people in order to improve democracy. From this perspective, they are populist in the best sense of the word. Their function, like that of the media, is to serve as watch dogs of the political establishment. Their refusal to be absorbed by this establishment is also the source of their power and independence.

March 20, 2020 Souwie

At age 26, French writer, Edouard Louis, is something of a literary sensation on a global scale. His autobiographical novel, The End of Eddy’, published when he was just 22, sold nearly half a million copies and has been translated into 20 languages. Through his writing, he has also become the voice of the many ‘invisible’ men and women whom politics and progress have left behind.

Edouard’s rags to riches story began in a small, working class town in Northern France. His father and grandfather left school at fifteen and went to work in a factory. His father would later lose his job at age 35 due to an accident at work that destroyed his back. Thereafter he struggled to support five children on the welfare payments that diminished each year. Edouard was the first in his family to attend university, the first to read books and the first to write them.

Why is Edouard Louis so popular?

In person, one is struck by the sincerity of this young man. In spite of a childhood in which reading and homosexuality were viewed with suspicion and disgust, Edouard Louis is open and hopeful. Perhaps it is his sincerity and sensitivity when talking of his past that draws people to him. He is immensely popular with a wide spectrum of readers. Why? He writes of poverty, violence and disillusionment. All three of his books: The End of Eddy (2014) , A History of Violence(2016) and Who killed my father (2018), focus on the author’s personal experiences. He explains that he has never believed in a narrator as such, he writes in the first person. ‘I’ve never wanted to write something that I didn’t experience with my own body’. The deep sincerity of his narratives affects the intensity with which so many readers respond to his writing.

‘For my father, politics was living or dying.’ – Edouard Louis

Louis talks about his most recent book, Who killed my father. It takes the form of an intimate letter addressed to his father, who is lying on his deathbed at the age of 50. For most, the figure of his obese, racist and homophobic father makes an unlikely muse. Yet Louis’s writing shows empathy and, ultimately, he takes it upon himself to defend this man. His father, he argues, was destroyed by entrenched social structures perpetuated by those for whom politics is a mere ‘parlour game’. But for many like his father, politics is literally “a question of life or death”. The young writer names and shames a string of French presidents. From Chirac to Macron, whose policies directly affected uneducated, working class men like his father.

‘The personal is always political’ – Edouard Louis

For Louis then, the personal is always political. The young author recounts the story of his first attempt at getting published. The big Paris publishing house to which he had sent his manuscript, rejected it. Their reason: poverty of the kind described in The End of Eddy hadn’t existed in France in more than a century. No one would believe the story. Yet it was this same poverty that Louis had experienced growing up in Hallencourt in the 1990’s. A family of 7 surviving on 700 euros a month.

‘Politics is not the same for the bourgeoisie as for the working class’. A political decision seldom affects the bourgeoisie in the way that it affects a working class family. Conversely, he never recalls seeing people from the bourgeoisie celebrating in the same way as they did. He remembers day trips to the beach because welfare payments were raised from one month to the next. However he also recalls how his father’s stomach was gradually destroyed by the poor medicine he was forced to take when disability allowances were slashed by Chirac’s government.

‘Masculinity is always an issue of silence’ – Edouard Louis

Who killed my father opens with a scene in which father and son stand opposite one another in an imagined arena. Although they are standing in close proximity to each other, they are unable to communicate. Edouard explains how he spent fifteen years in the same house as his father, sharing the same space, yet knew hardly anything about the man. ‘The only things I know about my father came from my mother and my aunt. Masculinity is always an issue of silence’ he says. ‘And silence is a type of violence too’. As a homosexual, Louis was ‘the shame of the family’ in his father’s eyes. ‘Shame was my birth certificate’ as he puts it. ‘I am the son of shame. As soon as I would talk, my father would lower his eyes. He was ashamed because it was not masculine enough for him’.

The violence of silence.

Louis uses this example to point again to the constructed nature of social norms. ‘Most of the time, rules and social norms fail to transform us’ he insists. The French writer is particularly concerned with what one might term, the violence of silence. These oppressive social and cultural norms create cultures of shame. “When you have violence, you have silence, and I want to undo this, to pulverise this silence’. Edouard Louis has become renowned for doing just this.

His second book, A History of Violence, focuses on Edouard’s own experience of rape and attempted murder. It is a powerful exploration of the relationship between violence and deeply entrenched sexual norms. Louis admits that his motivation for writing it, was to create a discussion around the way society deals with sexual violence. ‘The #MeToo movement emerged, and it was really beautiful, the way it allowed people to talk’. But he is also equally certain that violence can not be fixed with more violence. ‘In our society, people are in love with punishment’, he says. Louis attempted to get the rape charges against his aggressor dropped, but was told this was illegal.

‘Macron is the most violent president we have had in fifty years.’ – Edouard Louis

Edouard Louis describes Macron as ‘the most violent president we have had in fifty years’. His father’s support of Le Pen’s far right party may be understood, he explains, as a desire to be heard, to be represented in a political system that ignores men such as him.
He sees his father as both perpetrator and victim of the greater violence perpetuated on the poor and the ignorant in society. This includes the political left. Louis’s grandfather was a union man, yet both his mother and father were Le Pen supporters. ‘In the absence of any attempt by the left to discuss his suffering, my father took hold of the false explanations offered by the far-right’.

Edouard Louis draws attention to the changing face of the political left: How it gradually came to focus less on the old fashioned proletariat and more on things such as ‘harmony in diversity’, ‘social dialogue and calming tensions’. As Louis puts it, ‘my father understood that this technocratic vocabulary was meant to shut up the workers’. The left stopped fighting for the working class ‘against the laws of the marketplace’. Instead, he says, they tried to manage their lives ‘from within those laws’. For Louis this is clearly a deeply personal issue. However there are others like neoconservative political economist, Francis Fukuyama, who have raised similar concerns. The changing support base of the political left and the affect this has had on ‘the old white working class’ as Fukuyama calls them, is given as the primary cause for the rise of populism in his most recent book, Identity.

Manifesto of the gilets jaunes (yellow vest movement)?

Some have read Louis’s most recent book as a manifesto of the same men and women who are part of the yellow vest movement in France. Edouard Louis has been an early supporter of the movement and has marched in Paris with fellow activists. He sees the movement as ‘objectively left-wing’. A fight against the inequality that plagued his own childhood and the lives of his parents and grandparents before him. He admits feeling shock when he first saw the, ‘tired bodies and tired hands, broken backs and exhausted faces of those who never appear in the public and media space’.

But Louis also admits feeling paralyzed with anger by ‘the extreme violence and class contempt that is battering down on this movement’. It is difficult to argue with the young writer’s first hand experience of deprivation. ‘You must really never have experienced poverty, if you think that graffiti on a historic monument is worse than the impossibility of being able to take care of yourself, of living, of feeding yourself or your family’. Edouard Louis is unequivocal in his support for the uprising of the poor and down-trodden. ‘Anyone who insulted a gilet jaune was insulting my father’.

‘I cannot afford to write fiction.’ – Edouard Louis

For Edouard Louis, writing is his best weapon. He admits that ‘the minute we start to write, we are part of the bourgeoisie’. But feels very strongly his responsibility to ‘fight for the powerless, for a language that gives a place to the most invisible people’. The young writer says he cannot ‘afford to write fiction’. Instead he draws on what he terms, ‘the huge political strength’ of autobiography. He insists on putting truth at the core of his literary projects. ‘My writing forces people to confront real life.’

Perhaps it is fitting, then, that Edouard Louis describes his writing as a ‘different kind of literature’. An attempt even to ‘write against literature’. But most important, is his desire to get people talking, communicating with one another. Breaking the silence that, as Simon and Garfunkel once famously wrote, ‘like a cancer grows’. The young literary sensation mentions how he has received thousands of letters from people, all over the world, telling him about their lives. He smiles. ‘This is what I wanted, people to talk’.