Fifty million Frenchmen

Fareed Zakaria has a column on the "yellow vest" protests in France.  He suggests that they involve two divisions:  the left and right against the center, and rural areas versus cities.  He links to a report from the French survey firm IFOP which finds that "nearly 90 percent of people who back the major far-left and far-right parties view the movement favorably, compared with only 23 percent of people in President Emmanuel Macron’s centrist party."   That's true, but he doesn't mention that 76% of people who identify with the traditional mainstream left party, the Socialists, and 72% of people who identify with the traditional mainstream conservative party, the Republicans, have favorable views.  72% of the people who don't identify with any party also have favorable views.   Macron's party was founded in 2016 as a vehicle for his Presidential bid, so supporters of his party are essentially equivalent to people who support him, and they aren't very numerous now.  It's not surprising that they don't have favorable views of the movement, and when you set them aside the striking thing support is uniformly high.  The IFOP report also distinguishes between the Paris metropolitan area, urban areas in the provinces, and rural areas:  the percentages with favorable views are 66, 71, and 78.   Although support is higher in rural areas, I would not call that a big difference.  It also gives a breakdown by occupation:  at least 65% of every occupational group has favorable views, except for professionals and managers, who are at 57%. 

So there doesn't appear to be a "fissure between relatively better-educated urbanites and less-educated rural populations."  The differences among groups are not that large, and support is high among all parts of the population.   Rather than Trump or Brexit, a better parallel might be the movement for tax limitation (Proposition 13) in California 40 years ago.  That cut taxes without specifying spending cuts, and most of its supporters didn't seem to think that it would result in reductions in government services--the idea was that the government would find the money somewhere or be forced to be more efficient (see this post, and Sears and Citrin, Tax Revolt:  Something for Nothing in California for more detailed discussion).  Business, labor, and leading politicians of both parties opposed it as unrealistic and irresponsible, but it won with over 60% of the vote).  According to Sears and Citrin, the victory was broadly based--it won among almost all major population groups.