Open AccessChilean and French Social Protests of 2018‒2020: A Comparative Analysis
Author(s) -
Andrei Piatakov
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
sovremennaâ evropa
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.223
H-Index - 5
ISSN - 0201-7083
DOI - 10.15211/soveurope62020119128
Subject(s) - ideology , politics , social movement , political economy , political science , comparative case , biology and political orientation , sustainability , scale (ratio) , sociology , law , geography , ecology , cartography , biology , linguistics , philosophy
The article provides a comparative analysis of the Chilean protests, which began in 2019 and the Yellow Vests actions, which had started a year earlier. In the 2019 global protest wave, the Chilean and French social crises have some unique characteristics, which include the sustainability of protest activity and the advancement of fundamental demands going beyond the current problems. The author analyzes both protests’ interaction and their impact on each other. Several similarities of both protests revealed: lack of political leadership; the horizontal format of movements built upon the network principle; their remoteness from leading political parties, that is, the non-partisan nature of protests; all-national scale, etc. Chilean rallies were more radical in its nature involving a higher number of participants with a broader social base. The author explains difference in the protests’ political orientation: the left agenda dominated in Chile, while in France the movement was meta-ideological (neither right nor left). The author concludes that in Chile the protest was more mature and managed to achieve more significant results such as the constitutional reform.