As the Italian Government begins to ease its country out of the recent lockdown designed to deal with the coronavirus pandemic, thousands of right-wing protesters took to the streets of 70 Italian cities on Tuesday, demanding the resignation of Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte’s government. They accused his administration of being incapable of handling the COVID-19 crisis. They also demanded that Italy readopts the lira currency and drops the euro.

The demonstrations were staged to coincide with Italy’s Republic Day.

What is the Orange Vest Movement?

The rallies were organized by right-wing opposition parties to give voice to what they referred to as “the country that does not give up,” referring to Italian citizens devastated by the virus and struggling to cope with its substantial consequences. The protest took place in Rome’s central Piazza del Popolo.

Many of Italy’s right-wing leaders joined the demonstrations, including the League’s Matteo Salvini, Georgia Meloni, the leader of the far-right Brothers of Italy party, and Forza Italia’s Antonio Tajani. They joined together with hundreds of protesters to unfurl a 500-meter long Italian flag.

This protest was later joined by “Orange Vest” protesters, who are led by former army general Antonio Pappalardo.

Born on social media, the orange vests’ membership includes conspiracy theorists, anti-vaccination activists as well as ordinary Italian citizens who have seen their economic fortunes hindered by the lockdown. Many of their members also oppose Italy’s EU membership.

This is Just the Beginning for the Orange Vests

Pappalardo told protesters that children should not be made to wear masks and threatened to slap anyone who did. He argued that only he will take care of his lungs, stating that such containment measures infringe upon his freedom.

The Orange Vest movement insists that it is not going away. Organizers told the Daily Express that Tuesday’s rally was only a rehearsal for one that they have planned for July 4th. They intend to shape the future direction of Italian politics. It is too early to judge how successful they may be, but in order to gain an insight into what sort of impact these protests have, the Gilets Jaunes movement is a good example.

Inspired by the Gilets Jaunes

The number of protests in France has diminished, but the Gilets Jaunes still forced the French Government into providing billions of euros of tax breaks for French citizens, and they put neglected swathes of the country back on the map. Frédéric Gonthier, a political scientist at the Pacte research center and the School of Political Studies in Grenoble, told France 24 that they have put the working classes back at the heart of France’s political debate.

If the Orange Vests pursue their aims successfully, they are likely to have a similar impact on Italian politics. Euractiv reports that Giovanni Orsina, professor of politics at Rome’s LUISS University, told AFP that right-wing propaganda will become more attractive if people begin to suffer throughout the country.

How Will Conte Respond?

There are plenty of reasons to believe the Orange Vest movement may continue to grow in numbers. Already, millions of Italians have lost their jobs and the Italian economy is likely to contract by 9.1 percent this year- the worst peacetime decline in nearly a century.

A Tecne poll conduced on April 9th-10th found that support for leaving the EU was as high as 49 percent.

But the Orange Vests’ true impact on Italian politics will be measured by how Conte’s government responds to this movement. Considering he is a fervent supporter of the euro, he is unlikely to take Italy out of the eurozone. Assuming he stays in power, he may be forced into making further concessions to speed up Italy’s economic recovery if the orange vests succeed, which is what he did earlier this year by providing a €4 billion tax break for businesses.

If the League regains power, then Salvini will attempt to please the orange vests as much as he can, more so than Conte.

Either way, the Orange Vest movement represents significant dissatisfaction and anger towards Italy’s political establishment. Ordinary Italians are beginning to witness the potential they could have to transform Italian politics forever, but that depends on whether the Orange Vests succeed in expanding their membership and whether they continue to boost their visibility in the long-term.

L'articolo What Impact Could the Orange Vests Have on Italian Politics? proviene da InsideOver.

Jacline Mouraud sits before her computer screen, recording a video message to post to her handful of Facebook friends. “I have two little things to say to Mr Macron and his government. When will this attack on drivers end that you have put in place since you have been in office?” she demands. “I have made a little list of what we have suffered since you have been there, and we are fed up to the back teeth.”

The 52-year-old Bretonne native continues in that same vein for four-and-a-half minutes, lambasting French President Macron’s planned ‘green fuel tax’ as an assault on the common Frenchman.

Her diatribe certainly hit home – the video, which was posted to Facebook in October last year, garnered more than six million views in less than a month. It also catapulted Mouraud into the spotlight as one of the original exponents of the Gilets Jaunes, a grassroots revolutionary movement that are behind some of France’s most violent protest action in recent history.

Eschewing party affiliations

Every Saturday for the past seven months, Gilet Jaunes activists have taken to the streets in cities and towns around France, castigating the policies of Macron’s government. The group’s goals have swelled well beyond the original remit of simply abolishing the planned increase to fuel tax to a list of no less than 42 demands, which range from a rise in minimum wage to the resignation of Macron.

The anger directed at France’s leader and calls for governmental reform would suggest that the Gilets Jaunes are a political movement, but the truth is not so simple. “It’s making political claims, but it’s not a political movement in the sense of party politics,” explained Dr Pierre Bocquillon, a lecturer in European Politics at the University of East Anglia. The movement has always claimed to be leaderless and apolitical, and Gilet Jaunes participants themselves are not universally affiliated with a single political party – in fact, they come from right across the political spectrum.

An opinion poll published by the Elabe Institute found that in the May 2017 elections, 36 percent of participants had voted for far-right candidate Marine Le Pen, while 28 percent had supported her polar political opposite, leftist politician Jean-Luc Melenchon. Similarly, when five Le Monde journalists studied the Gilets Jaunes demands, they found that two-thirds were “very close” to the position of the radical left, while almost half were “compatible” with the position of the far right.

In France’s Assemblée Nationale, these two political factions have a highly fractious relationship and struggle to co-exist at the best of times, so it seems implausible that their representatives would be part of the same movement. But they have found common ground in their economic reality. “When you look at the sociology of the [Gilets Jaunes], many are the kind of people who are just making ends meet – they’re not necessarily the poorest but nevertheless, they’re in quite precarious situations where the end of the month is difficult,” said Bocquillon. “That was what really called many people to the movement originally.”

Organising a revolution

As the movement has grown, however, some of the more politicised Gilets Jaunes have begun to organise themselves in a bid to safeguard the longevity of their movement. Mouraud, for example, founded her own political party in January this year, named Les Émergents (the Arisen). She told reporters at the launch that she viewed this organisational step as vital in safeguarding the longevity of the movement, saying: “Phase A has been done – everyone knows what is happening in France. Now we have to pass on to phase B and launch into building and proposing. To demand without proposing something is a little illogical.”

“It’s one solution, as momentum can only last for so long,” said Bocquillon. However, the lack of overarching political affiliations within the movement makes it nigh on impossible to establish a party with a manifesto that every Gilet Jaune could support. This was an issue that one faction of the movement came up against when they put forward ten candidates for last month’s European elections. “A lot of people said ‘they don’t represent us, they just decided that they represent us, and we don’t want that’,” explained Bocquillon.

However, there’s another, deeper reason for resistance against party politics within the movement. Elabe polling in December also showed that five percent of respondents had voted for Macron in the May 2017 elections; they had been drawn in by his outsider status, and had hoped that he could improve their quality of life. The fuel tax was the straw that broke the camel’s back in a long line of policy changes that appeared to favour the richest in French society. Enraged, these Gilets Jaunes turned their backs not just on Macron, but on traditional politics altogether.

This anger and distrust means that any move that seeks to bring the Gilets Jaunes into those circles will always be met with scepticism and reluctance. It’s the reason that figures such as Melenchon and Le Pen have been unable to make significant inroads – why should they be trusted any more than Macron?

Nevertheless, the stark truth remains that alignment with an existing political party, or the establishment of their own, may be the Gilets Jaunes’ only hope for survival. They were able to earn certain concessions from Macron in December by virtue of their sheer disruptive impact on the country, but as the movement wanes in size, this strategy seems less likely to succeed. Last Saturday saw just 7,000 Gilets Jaunes take to the streets, compared to a high of more than 250,000 last year. With the power of collective bargaining fading, if the movement hopes to achieve its stated goals, it will have to relinquish its apoliticism and set aside individual loyalties.

L'articolo The Politicisation of the Gilets Jaunes proviene da InsideOver.