Yellow Vests: Fighting for The People or Democracy? Analysing the Meanings of Political Representation and Democracy in the Belgian Yellow Vest Movement

Since late 2018, the Yellow vests (YV) movement has been challenging our understanding of ‘democracy’ and ‘political representation’ in several important ways, in France but also in Belgium where the YV have known a discernible international extension. First, under the YV claim of giving a voice to ‘The People’ lies a highly heterogeneous composition and modus operandi, which challenge the homogeneous conception of ‘The People’ produced by the dominant representative institutions. Second, the YV has shifted remarkably quickly from a contentious reaction in the face of high fuel prices to an organized expression of popular indignation towards our representative systems, here claiming that ‘we don’t live in a real democracy’. In this paper, we propose to analyze and unpack these two central claims by focusing on the “Belgian Yellow Vests” (BYV). Despite recent scholarly interest in the movement, much remains to be understood on what this movement means for representative democracy today. In particular, we ask the following questions: how do the participants of the movement understand democracy and political representation? How do they express their feelings of not being represented? What do they denounce and how do they voice their demands to ‘change the system’? Finally, how have they reached the conclusion that “we don’t live in a real democracy”? To start answering these questions, we conduct a qualitative analysis of data collected by means of focus groups with participants of the movement (January 2019) and based on field work (observations at protest actions, online observations of Facebook pages and groups) carried out between November 2018 and February 2019. We propose a two-level analysis. First, we analyze the claims of the YV, categorized according to the three dimensions of political representation: substantial, procedural, symbolic. Here, we argue that the growing importance of “procedural claims”, especially illustrated by the unanimous call for an institutionalized Popular Initiative Referendum, is a way for the movement to unify itself under a common ideal, whereas the substantial or symbolic dimensions could explain the varieties of grievances voiced by the movement. Second, we conduct a discourse analysis of the signifier “democracy”, examining here how it is mobilized, with which meanings and purposes, during the discussions conducted in the focus groups. This two-level analysis will allow us to document the representations of democracy and political representation developed by the movement, while at the same contributing to a better understanding of people’s resentment towards the model of liberal representative democracy.