Justice & Law Quote by Jose Saramago

Saramago is pointing to a basic fact that polite democracies prefer to treat as impolite: rights are often negotiated in the street before they are ratified in parliament. By invoking the French employment law reversal, he chooses an example that punctures the myth of inevitability. Policy is not weather; it changes when enough bodies refuse to be managed.

The phrasing matters. "Look what happened" is a conversational jab, less sermon than proof-by-example. He isn’t praising protest as lifestyle politics or moral theater; he’s describing it as leverage. The subtext is a rebuke to spectatorship, to the modern habit of confusing awareness with agency. "Withdrawn" is the key verb: power can retreat. Saramago, a novelist steeped in allegory and a lifelong leftist, is always interested in how institutions maintain authority through inertia, fear, and the isolation of citizens from one another. He’s arguing that mass presence breaks that spell.

"Global protest movement" expands the frame beyond national grievance into a shared condition: precarious labor, weakened social contracts, governments that triangulate toward markets and call it realism. This isn’t naive internationalism; it’s an implicit diagnosis that the forces being protested are already global, so resistance can’t stay local without being outflanked.

The last clause is the hardest: "people who won’t give up". It rejects the romantic image of protest as a single cathartic march. Saramago is calling for endurance politics, the kind that outlasts media cycles and state patience. The intent is less to inspire than to discipline: persistence is the only language power reliably understands.