The French protesters known as the “Yellow Vests,” for the safety jackets that have become the emblem of their movement against austerity, income inequality, and the government of President Emmanuel Macron, are hard to describe accurately on a left-right political spectrum.

That has not stopped politicians and activists of all stripes from attempting to claim the movement, but it is worth taking any opportunity to actually listen to the voices of the protesters themselves. So we can be grateful that video journalist Raul Gallego Abellan spent last Saturday in Paris asking a broad spectrum of protesters how they describe the movement themselves, and what they say to observers who want to focus only on the sporadic clashes with the police that broke out along the Champs-Élysées.

What was striking about the protesters Gallego Abellan met and spoke with, he said, was how much more diverse, politically and socially, they were than the largely white, rural members of the movement who took to the streets last month, when the protests were triggered by a planned fuel tax increase and joined by far-right activists.

Last weekend, Gallego Abellan said, more left-wing activists, students, ambulance drivers, truck drivers, and others joined the protest. There were also, for the first time, “people from the poor suburbs called the banlieues,” the filmmaker noted, “urban working-class, middle-class, second- and third-generation immigrants from North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa.”

On the streets of Paris on Saturday, the central message was that the poor, the working class, and the middle class were being taxed too much to support policies that rewarded the rich. People said they were tired of the political system that had forced them last year to vote for Macron, a former minister and investment banker, just to keep out the far-right National Front candidate, Marine Le Pen.

Macron “misjudged the nature of his mandate when he won,” the British commentator David Runciman argued this week on his “Talking Politics” podcast. “The key election was the first round, not the second round, of the French presidential system, when he won 24 percent of the vote. That’s his support. Everything else has to be coalition-building, everything has to be compromise, and he has governed as the guy who won 66 percent of the vote in the second round.”