Yellow Vests back to street with a fresh Demonstrations again

Demonstrations in France, sit-ins near the Eiffel
Tower and a flashmob at Charles de Gaulle airport: the Yellow Vests are
organising a weekend of new types of protest for their Act 17 to try to combat
falling numbers.
This comes before what protestors are calling the
"Ultimatum" on March 16, to mark the end of President Emmanuel
Macron’s three months of "Great National Debate".
After almost four months of weekly protests, the
anti-government movement has been facing a slow decline for several Saturdays.
For Act 16, 39,300 demonstrators were registered in France by the Interior
Ministry, including 4,000 in Paris.
The numbers were down slightly from the previous
Saturday, when 46,600 protesters took to the streets across France, including
5,800 in the capital. In general, the numbers have been steadily declining from
the 282,000 peak at the start of the Yellow Vests protests last November. To
counter this waning turnout, protestors have devised original new ways to make
their dissent known.
“Decisive act: we will not move” is the name for the
main event of the weekend in Paris. The protestors are holding a three-day
sit-in on the Champ de Mars, the park in front of the Eiffel Tower.
Demonstrations are also planned in Lyon, Besançon, Strasbourg, Lille, Bordeaux,
Montpellier, Avignon, Quimper or Le Puy-en-Velay.
As early as Friday evening, some 30 demonstrators
tried to set up a few structures near the Eiffel Tower, but were quickly
dislodged by the police, an AFP journalist noted.
“Without the announcement of real measures, we will
stay on site all weekend and beyond if necessary,” says the event’s Facebook
page, which has 1,400 participants registered on Facebook and 6,600 marked as
“interested”.
The occupation of the Champ de Mars was largely
relayed by prominent leaders of the movement. “The 8,9,10, big sit-in, big
mobilisation,” Maxime Nicolle promised in a video on Thursday. “We’ll sleep on
the spot.”
The Parisian sit-in must “set up our roundabouts in
the heart of the capital, where we will be visible to everyone and get our
message across”, explained another high-profile Yellow Vest member Priscillia
Ludosky at a press conference last week.
Act 17 has also taken inspiration from International
Women’s Day. On Saturday, the Yellow Vest women are calling for a demonstration
in Paris, starting at 11:00am between the Champs-Élysées and Luxembourg Park.
The aim is to “bring all mobilisations together”.
A “giant flashmob” at Terminal 1 of Paris’s Roissy
airport has also been announced at midday to protest against Aéroports de
Paris’s privatisation project.
For the Yellow Vests, the stated objective for March
is to revive the spirit of the beginning of the movement.
Scheduled for March 16, Act 18 of the movement will
take place the day after the official end of the Great National Debate and
hopes to bring together “the whole of France in Paris” to issue an “ultimatum”
to the government.