The Left will also be in the Street, on Saturday

published in l’Humanité on Friday, November 30, 2018

With the yellow vests or the CGT, several political groups will be in the streets on Saturday, December 1, in the hope of seeing the struggles against the high cost of living converge.

Along with the trade unions, a part of the left is determined to get involved in the movement against the high cost of living. At the call of the CGT, the new national secretary of the PCF, Fabien Roussel, along with Ian Brossat, will be on Saturday at the Paris demonstration against unemployment and precarity. "The President of the Republic has not given clear answers on this question of purchasing power; the French must continue to gather, to demonstrate". "They must maintain the pressure" in a "calm, serene and determined" way, judged this week the deputy from the North, calling the yellow jackets to maintain "a united front" and "not to be so suspicious" towards organizations. If he considers the mobilization "legitimate", Benoît Hamon, who "will maintain the trajectory of the carbon tax" if he were in power, but with "the means to ensure social support", is more discreet.

Beginning on Thursday evening, an open-air GA at Place de la République

On Thursday evening, however, FI Deputy François Ruffin called on Parisians to participate in an open-air General Assembly on Place de la République, organized by "la Fête à Macron". In the tradition of Nuit debout, the collective celebrated, in the spring, the first year of the five-year period in the street. "If we want a real national movement, Paris must wake up, take a look at the country and remember that it is the revolutionary Paris of 1789, 1936, 1945, May 68," he declared on BFMTV. "We will not defeat the oligarchy, the lobbies, the multinationals and their megaphones at the Elysée without both. Without the working classes and the educated classes. This is the historical block we need to weld together," he adds in the last issue of his newspaper, Fakir. On Thursday, too, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, whose appeal to the people has been strongly reactivated in recent days, announced that he will be on the Champs-Élysées with the yellow vests on Saturday. The MP for Bouches-du-Rhône also pleaded on the plateau of France 2 for a mobilization "absolutely, radically, totally and in all cases non-violent". "By acting as we do," he writes on his blog on behalf of FI, "both as "fish in water" in the movement and as facilitators, doing wherever we can and at all levels. We believe we have succeeded in preventing the terrible divide that threatened: seeing the movement forced to turn to the right and the far right to be politically strenghtened," says the IF leader. A warm welcome is not a foregone conclusion, however: "We do not need these politicians", replied a yellow vest from the Loire, when the MP’s visit was announced. To be continued on Saturday.