Can someone explain the nuances of these protests?
Am I wrong to find it weird that the seemingly liberal, "woke" French are rioting over a carbon tax? Aren't carbon taxes progressive and environmentally responsible?
Am I wrong to find it weird that the seemingly liberal, "woke" French are rioting over a carbon tax? Aren't carbon taxes progressive and environmentally responsible?
It's the combination of (real and/or perceived):
- rise of inequalities
- new taxes (including the carbon tax)
- removal of taxes impacting only the rich
- sentiment of neglect of the rural areas by the government
- disdain for lower classes by Macron
- lower purchasing power for low/middle class
and probably some other stuff. It's really an aggregation of all that. Add the fact that there is no leader, no precise demands, this makes a nightmare for the government to fix or contain.
Far right would be openly pro-nazi, or Vichy nostalgic small organizations like Oeuvre Française and other dissolved and then formed again groups. Add unaffiliated fascist skinheads in the mix.
Then again, almost every nuance of the spectrum between those two is represented in the protesters.
We're at a point now where we have to give up priviliges to slow down climate change. Even if the majority agrees to do it, some will refuse and turn violent. And unfortunately, the violence will cause more headlines.
Yes, the French routing over taxes is not historically uncommon, and the French aren't unified ideologically, and particularly aren't uniformly left-wing. And, as I understand, it's not as simple as just carbon taxes, either.
We see much less representation of their conservatives here. Pardon me for being slightly ignorant on this, and thank you for the reminder.
LePen's Rassemblement National is anti-immigration, and anti Europe or anti globalization, so in this regard could be close to some of Trump's positions but is not at all against welfare state.
Most people protesting want less gas taxes, but not at the cost of lesser healthcare or education.
I believe this is a position that does not really exist in the American political spectrum.
So it was explained by the speaker that culturally French people are more on the side of "Social Justice" rather than "Freedom", but that does necessarily means there are more "liberal" than "conservative". It can look similar but if you are looking really close, you cannot really apply American labels. I believe this is one of the reason it looks confusing and it is hard to explain from an outsider perspective.
Sure, most Western countries are; by the standard of most other developed Western, the dominant faction of the Democratic Party is somewhere between center-right and right-wing, while the Republican Party as a whole (not just it's extremist fringe) is far-right. But that doesn't mean that other countries don't have as much (or, often, more) left-right range as the US, just different centers.