While the Interior Ministry has agreed that the event will be held in the Champ de Mars Saturday 24th November, Yellow Vests protesters focus on the Champs-Elysees.
What will Act 2 look like when yellow jackets are mobilized? A large rally is scheduled Saturday, November 24 in Paris, but the vagueness prevails in a context of tension with the authorities.
Champ de Mars or Champs-Elysées?
After dismissing the scenario of a rally on Place de la Concorde, the Interior Ministrysaid Thursday, November 22 that the “yellow vests”, mobilized especially against fuel prices, could meet on the esplanade of the Champ- de-Mars , near the Eiffel Tower, after receiving several requests in this direction in the prefecture.
“The Champ-de-Mars offers the necessary security conditions, it can accommodate the protesters. A security device will be put in place to protect the sensitive areas of the capital, the roads, the railway stations and railways that lead to them, as well as the logistics platforms.”
But “yellow vests” quickly rejected this hypothesis . “The event will not take place there,” said LCI Priscillia Ludosky, one of the people at the initiative of the movement in the Paris region. An announcement will be made Friday, she said, evoking a rally “in the heart of Paris, certainly at the Champs-Elysees”.
Les #GiletsJaunes sur le Champ-de-Mars samedi ?
Priscillia Ludosky, l’initiatrice de la pétition en ligne sur le carburant dément sur #LCI. pic.twitter.com/rOkLHiSyAx— LCI (@LCI) 22 November 2018
Any event is prohibited by order in a perimeter including the Concorde, the Elysee, Matignon and the National Assembly, which will be cordoned off by the police, recalled in the evening the Secretary of State to the Minister of State. Interior, Laurent Nuñez.
77% of French people approve of the move
Launched on social networks outside any union or political framework, the movement wants to make the Paris meeting “Act 2” of his protean mobilization, which has placed the executive on the defensive and the majority in a certain dismay.
On the 17th November, at least 282,000 people responded to the call to block roads and strategic sites.
According to an Odoxa poll for Le Figaro and FranceInfo, 77% of French people consider this movement “justified” .
“I hope there is going to be a real yellow tide”
This is the wish of Frank Buhler, one of the initiators of the movement in the Tarn-et-Garonne.
Faced with an affluence difficult to estimate – more than 34,000 people declared themselves as ” participants ” on Facebook- and faced with the fear of overflowing, the Interior Ministry warned that “the judicial response will be intractable in case of unrest” .
A rally in Paris that divides
This Parisian rendezvous divides into “yellow vests” . “We will not waste fuel, it would be a little silly,” said Tristan Lozach, who coordinates the movement in the Côtes d’Armor.
Some, like Fabrice Schlegel, leader of the movement in Dole (Jura), prefer to act “on a departmental scale”.
“First, not everyone has to put 150 euros to make the trip and then we are worried about the violence that can occur.”
At “the last big event in Paris, May 1, the ‘black bloc’ were out and there was a lot of breakage. I do not want to participate in something like that. ”
Shortness of blockages …
In the field, the movement marked the pace Thursday after six days of mobilisation, which has broadened to a more general challenge of the decline in purchasing power and taxes.
Thursday, the Interior Ministry has identified about 12,000 protesters in metropolitan France (and 3200 in Reunion), against 15,000 Wednesday. Since the start of the movement on Saturday, two people have died, 620 civilians and 136 law enforcement officers were wounded, 879 people arrested and 693 placed in police custody, said Beauvau.
Some diehards continued to organize scattered blockages in mainland France, with filter dams near oil depots or on certain roads in the Pas-de-Calais, Gard, Hérault, Vaucluse, Haut-Rhin or New -Aquitaine.
… but the road traffic is still disrupted
At the toll Virsac (Gironde), evacuated Wednesday by the police after being vandalized, traffic on the A10 was restored in the direction Paris-Bordeaux after work rehabilitation.
The unrest is now concentrated on the island of Reunion where, despite the introduction of a curfew at night, the situation remains tense after an outbreak of urban violence . “We will be intractable because we can not accept the scenes we have seen,” responded Wednesday President Emmanuel Macron, announcing the dispatch of reinforcements gendarmerie.
Fewer, persistent dams continue to disrupt traffic.
Merchants worried about Black Friday
Among traders, the concern is “great, especially in this period, with (promotions) Black Friday and shopping for the end of the year celebrations that begin,” said the delegate general of the Federation of Trade and of distribution (FCD), Jacques Creyssel.
These disturbances go beyond borders . The Spanish Ministry of Foreign Affairs complained Thursday of the “obstacles to the free movement of goods” on the Basque border, and heavy goods traffic to England was disrupted in Calais with the blocking of the A16 motorway leading at the Channel Tunnel.
