Anti-Party, Pro-Politics: The Gilets Jaunes\u27 Challenge to Western Representative Democracy

This paper aims to evaluate the implications of France’s Gilets Jaunes movement for Western representative democracy. The Gilets Jaunes movement is unprecedented due to its durability, its ideological vagueness compared with the specificity of its political demands, and its resistance to institutional support, including political parties, labor unions and civil society organizations. This paper contextualizes the movement’s demands and particularities through a demographical analysis of its participants and an investigation of its characterization as “anti-system” to understand (a) the explanations of its institutional resistance and (b) the movement’s successes, limitations and implications in the context of this resistance