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Still the yellow vests do not give up. Despite the miserable weather in many parts of France, almost 100,000 Frenchmen were on their way again this weekend in their yellow war effort. As much as last weekend. For the first time, the biggest demonstration took place not in Paris, but far to the south in Toulouse. This shows that the yellow vests are more a movement of small people from rural areas. They think they have no voice in Paris.
But the longer the protests last, the greater the resistance of established politics. She sees in the yellow vests not the chance for a social turnaround, but a troublesome business interruption. Even abroad: "What is happening in France worries me," said the new CDU chief Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer on the weekend of the French newspaper Le Monde . It sounded as if she wanted to turn the old fear of the France exile Heinrich Heine into its opposite ("I think of France in the night, then I'm about to sleep").
For Heine, anti-revolutionary Germany was once Europe's biggest political risk. For AKK, it is France today, in which once more seems to be a revolution. As unbearable undemocratic she feels the resignation demands on President Emmanuel Macron, who also decorated this weekend again the hand-painted posters of the French protesters.
The President is slowly regaining control of the situation
The days when you had to worry about Macron's future seriously, are long gone. The president is now cleverly organizing a rollback against the yellow vests: he is engaged in devotional debates throughout the country with the locally well-anchored but generally very conservative mayors. For seven hours at a time, he discussed them with Normandy on Tuesday, another six hours in a fort on Friday in Occitania. "More endurance than Fidel Castro" attested to those present.
Already Macron wins again in the polls, although he makes the yellow vests no new concessions more. It is quite possible that he will continue to gain approval with his current strategy. This is particularly interesting because the demands of the Yellow West for more purchasing power and less taxes are still supported by the majority of the population.
In the past two months since the first Yellow-West protest on 17 November, France has seen something in the Western industrialized countries without precedent: a social coming-out of the lower middle class. Not the really poor, but those who are afraid of impoverishment. Not the trade unionists and the left, who in France since 1968 have repeatedly carried social demands on the streets. But including the small people, craftsmen and shopkeepers who complained so far only at the counter of their corner café or anonymous on the Internet.
Here sounds the sound of the snack bar
In blockade stories around the clock, at roundabouts and in front of supermarkets, the yellow vests chattered in a movement that suddenly developed its own self-confidence. Anyone who came with slogans from the right-wing extremist Marine Le Pen or the left, often received a rebuff.
Instead, the people in yellow vest pulled into the national talk shows and continued to talk there as they talk in Germany at the snack bar: direct, overbearing, funny and, above all, understandable. They were not about big politics, not about foreigners or refugees and other scapegoats, but almost exclusively about money. They have not enough to live in dignity, say almost all the yellow vests - similar to the peasants who pushed the French Revolution in 1789 and fought for a new currency in the same, great revolutionary year.
In the historical retrospective, it becomes clear how directly the uprising of the yellow vests affects Germany. Macron eased ten billion euros in December for the movement's social demands. His country is no longer fulfilling the European stability criteria, on which Germany is the leader.
Was it wrong to give the yellow vests anything? To be blackmailed? No, on the contrary, to suppress them, to ignore their demands for more social justice - that would be the biggest mistake Macron could make.