“We hope to create a list that resembles the citizens and shows that we are independent and nonpartisan from the first day,” campaign manager Hayk Shahinyan told France’s BFM Television.

The group hopes, too, that widespread support for their protests in cities and towns across France will translate into electoral support.

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According to figures released recently by Ifop, a French polling and market research firm, 16 percent of the French identify themselves as yellow vests, and 40 percent sympathize with the movement on some level.

An Ifop survey found that 7.5 percent of respondents would vote for hypothetical yellow vest candidates in E.U. elections. The dominance of French President Emmanuel Macron’s party, République En Marche (Republic on the Move), would remain unchanged. Despite the criticism Macron has faced, with protesters shouting for his resignation, En March would still capture 23 percent of the vote, coming out ahead of Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally party, according to the poll. But yellow vest participation would draw support away from other challenger parties.

With the precedent of Macron’s party having emerged from nowhere, along with the model of a grass-roots populist movement that rose to power in Italy, the possibility of an official yellow vest faction seems more likely than it might have at other moments, even in Europe’s recent past.

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But some political analysts question whether such a loosely organized movement can transition into a political operation with a clear leadership structure and a coherent message that goes beyond distaste for Macron.

And there are major divisions within the movement over whether to enter politics or remain an outside force.

The yellow vest candidates are calling themselves the “Citizens’ Initiative Rally.” That suggests an emphasis on a proposal for popular referendums to vet government policies, which has been among the constellation of demands from yellow vest protesters.

Italy’s Five Star Movement similarly embraced Internet-enabled direct democracy. Like France’s yellow vests, the Five Star Movement was born on social media, tapped into anger toward the country’s political and economic elites and, at least originally, identified neither with the right nor the left.

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The movement, founded by a comedian in 2009, proceeded to upend Italian politics. It came in second in national elections in 2013 and then, last year, became a partner in the country’s ruling coalition, forming Western Europe’s first fully populist government.

Luigi Di Maio, Italy’s deputy prime minister and the current leader of the Five Star Movement, offered his support to the yellow vests this month. “Do not let go!” he wrote in a letter.

“We are in power and those who taunted us have disappeared today from the political scene,” Di Maio said.

Italian leaders, meanwhile, have been using Macron as a foil. Di Maio last weekend blamed mass migration to Europe on French neocolonialism. And Interior Minister Matteo Salvini, head of the League, the party that governs with the Five Star Movement, called Macron “a terrible president” this past week.

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Can the yellow vests follow the Five Star path? Italian political analysts highlight important differences between the French movement and their own populist start-up.

“This spontaneous movement [in France] is very plural,” said Massimiliano Panarari, who has written a book on the Five Star Movement. “It’s enough in the dimension of protesting against something, but it’s not enough to build a political organization.

“Above all in this postmodern age, political parties need a strong, communicative leadership, and the yellow vests cannot have that kind of leadership. They don’t have a political culture,” Panarari said.

Some yellow vest protesters have eschewed politics altogether. The announcement of a slate of candidates prompted backlash on the movement’s social media channels, with sharp criticism of an effort seen as a “contradiction” and a “paradox.”

An organized political structure would betray the movement’s spirit, says Priscillia Ludosky, 33, whose Change.org petition against rising carbon taxes last May helped galvanize collective anger and arguably made her the first “gilet jaune.”

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Ludosky, a former bank employee who now sells cosmetics online, hopes the yellow vest protests can influence politics without directly engaging in it — much like the Occupy Wall Street movement did in the United States. She wants the yellow vests to hold elites to account, not join them.

“What’s the final aim?” she asked, referring to the shortlist of candidates. “To enter into the system? I’m not sure it’s a good idea.”

This sort of split — between a chorus of voices advocating to remain a movement and those who insist on targeting where power is held — is common among young social movements, said Catherine Fieschi, an expert on the French far right and executive director of the London-based think tank Counterpoint.

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“This is totally classic new social movement stuff,” Fieschi said. “This is the stuff that tore the Greens apart, long before the gilets jaunes.”

Fieschi said she had anticipated greater public support for those willing to engage than for those who remain focused on protesting — and instigating violence.

“Those people who are willing to participate in the grand débat, who are willing to field candidates, they’re the ones that public opinion is going to like and support,” she said, referring to Macron’s initiative to hold a “grand national debate” on France’s future. “The others, even if they’re not fascist nut cases, they’re going to be put in that basket, Hillary’s basket of deplorables. That’s going to do them quite a bit of damage.”

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For now, the candidate list, incomplete as it is, is a symbolic revolt against France’s new political status quo.

Macron’s election in 2017 was a watershed event. It brought about the demise of France’s traditional center-right and center-left parties, and it inaugurated one-party rule in France. In an unprecedented turn of events, the party founded by the sitting president came to hold an absolute majority in the French Parliament. Deputies from that party — many of whom are political novices — were handpicked by Macron, which, in the eyes of many, has undermined their ability to legislate independently of the Elysee Palace.