"Yellow vests" protest planned for Amsterdam on Saturday

Protest movement "yellow vests" announced a protest march in Amsterdam on Saturday. Protesters will gather at the Stopera at 11:30 a.m. and then march along the Amstel and around the city hall. The protest was reported to the municipality, a spokesperson for Amsterdam mayor Femke Halsema said to Het Parool.

The yellow vests movement started in France. Over the past weeks riots broke out during "gilets jaunes" protests against the increase in fuel prices. The protesters demanded that President Emmanuel Macron resign. Over the weekend, the French police arrested 412 people in Paris and at least 133 people were injured in clashes with security forces, according to the newspaper. Hundreds of thousands of euros of damage was done to the iconic Arc de Triomphe. 

There were also yellow vests protests in The Hague, Maastricht and Nijmegen on Saturday. In The Hague three people were arrested for not complying with police ordinance, among other things. As the protesters did not report their demonstration to the municipality, the group was asked to end their protest. In Maastricht one person was arrested for disrupting public order.

On Facebook, the Dutch yellow vests describe themselves as a "citizen's movement". "The real yellow vests are middle-class people who try to make it clear to society that they are struggling to make ends meet at the end of the month", according to the Facebook group, which has nearly 19 thousand members.