The 10 tribes of the French anti-health pass protests – POLITICO

John Lichfield is a former foreign editor of the Independent and was the newspaper’s Paris correspondent for 20 years.

CALVADOS, France — President Charles de Gaulle said that it was impossible to govern a country with 258 kinds of cheese. He underestimated the problem. Actually, France has over 1,000 varieties of fromage.

His successor, Emmanuel Macron, might frame the question in a different way. How can you deal with a protest movement that has at least 10 disparate and often contradictory viewpoints?

Street protests each Saturday against the French “health pass” have, against expectations, continued into the peak holiday month of August. They even increased in size, from 114,000 people nationwide on 17 July to 237,000 on August 7, before dipping slightly to 215,000 on Saturday.

The protesters range from the anti-Semitic far right to the anti-capitalist far left, from anarchists to fundamentalist Catholics, from elaborate conspiracy theorists to apolitical restaurant and health workers. There are also many people, including family groups, who say they have never demonstrated before but distrust the vaccines or object to the state making vaccination quasi-compulsory.

The expanded passe sanitaire (health pass) — requiring a recent negative coronavirus test; proof of recovery from the virus; or proof of full vaccination — took effect on August 9. Without the pass, you cannot have a drink in a bar or eat a meal in a restaurant, visit a cinema, theater or museum, or travel long distances by bus, train or plane.

The same law threatens health and care workers with suspension and then dismissal unless they are fully vaccinated by October 15.

In one crucial respect, the pass has already been a triumph. More than 10 million French people have had first doses of a vaccine since Macron announced the pass on July 12 — doubling the previously flagging daily rate of first shots.

France is on course to have given a first dose of a coronavirus vaccine to 50 million people over the age of 12 — 86.6 percent of that age group; 89 percent of adults — by the end of this month.

Opinion polls suggest that the protesters have the support of only one in three French people (although one in two say they “understand” their anger). Nonetheless, the Saturday protests are growing. If anything, the ranks of the apolitical marchers have inflated the most.

Comparisons have been made with the early days of the Yellow Jackets protests in late 2018 and early 2019. That movement was also spontaneous and largely leaderless and had many contradictory tribes. It was fuelled by online conspiracy theories. It also was ferociously anti-Macron.

But there are also significant differences.

The Yellow Jackets, in their early days, were mostly rural and outer-suburban. The anti-passers are largely urban. The Yellow Jackets had wide popular support. The anti-passers do not.

The Yellow Jackets protests shrank steadily from their first turnout of 280,000 nationwide. The anti-pass protesters are steadily expanding.

Who are they? Here is POLITICO’s…