I understand the confusion.
In France, a lot of the French look at protest the way they look at football (soccer). It's a full contact sport. They even have a law about how their streets are to be constructed. They have to have cobbles in the mix (big stones), so that when riots occur the people can dig out something to throw.
Further, their national identity is tied up with protest. The French Revolution began with protests.
So the French are always more willing to identify with protestors than the government that they are protesting against.
So there's that.
But this time the mix is a little different.
The government is broke. Their generous welfare state has been a little too generous. And it's had a lot of extra mouths to feed and people to house with all the immigrants who have come in. The result is that that spiked up the burn rate on the French treasury. Now Macron has nothing left he can use to throw to the mob as a sop.
We made France's life too easy during the Cold War. The strategy was to make Western Europe such an attractive place to live that the Soviets would just stop fighting the West because they wanted to join it.
Incidentally, the strategy worked. The Russians said 'We give', and reached out. But some idiots in the Pentagon slapped their hands away. Dumbest move ever made by anyone at any time.
In any case, we provided them with security they got on the cheap, which allowed them to have a generous social safety net, which they then came to believe was the way their lives should be. They wanted 'that'. But they didn't think about what it was costing other people to give them 'that'.
And they would have a meltdown whenever anyone tried to take 'that' away from them.
Now here we are at the end. There is no more road to kick the can down on. France is broker than an addict before payday.
Unless Macron has finally emerged from whatever hole he was hiding in, no one has seen him since the protests started. He has nothing to give, therefore he has nothing to say. He might be begging the EU for some money to tide the country over until he leaves office in April or May.
Then the mess can land on Marine Le Pen's desk, and the Globalists will try to blame everything on her.
The only thing actually new about this round of protests is that you see the occasional Palestinian flag. They are only the cherry on top of the hot fudge sundae. Most of the sundae is something else.
If no one bails Macron out, this could lead to some very bad unrest, because the French will not accept that their cozy time is over. And no one can throw a fit like the French.
