France’s Protest Movement Is Fighting More Than Macron

Macron offered “crumbs.” France answered with a general strike against austerity that brought the country to a standstill and more than 1.6 million people to the streets. Iman D., a student organizer with the Party for Socialism and Liberation, was on the ground at the Paris protests. She tells Zoe Alexandra and Rania Khalek the multinational, multigenerational movement behind the shutdown names capitalism as the problem, not just Emmanuel Macron and Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu.

Iman explains why Nov. 5 general strikers carried Palestinian flags and wore keffiyehs, and unpacks how Black and Arab youth from the suburbs – the children and grandchildren of the people France colonized – helped spark the uprising. She recounts a visit to a high school in Saint-Denis, where students described unchecked Islamophobia, from the school hijab ban to police abductions from classrooms, and a system that pours money into war while their schools crumble. It’s “continued colonialism,” they say, carried out by forces descended from those that brutalized their grandparents in Algeria.

A Minnesota organizer herself, Iman draws the line from Paris to the Minneapolis general strikes against ICE’s Operation Metro Surge. And after the midterms’ blue tsunami that won Democrats control of Congress, she stresses now’s not the time to settle for crumbs: “It’s mass movements that really create change.”

France’s uprising isn’t just about Macron: “It’s not just this one issue. It’s the whole system that’s the issue.”

Iman D. of @pslnational on the demands linking Paris to January’s general strikes in Minneapolis