“Everything that we said back then came true,” said Medea Benjamin, an activist and founder of CodePink, who seized the WTO stage in 1999 before that summit fell apart over trade disagreements.

 

More than 13,000 police are protecting this year’s gathering, which is hosted by French President Emmanuel Macron, a former banker, and will include U.S. President Donald Trump and other Group of Seven leaders. France’s interior minister specifically cited the 1999 “Battle of Seattle” as the model to be avoided at all costs.

 

“The first threat is, as we know, the risk of outbreaks (of violence) ... Violent individuals, not to be confused with peaceful protesters, try at each international summit to provoke riots and to hinder the smooth functioning of the meetings,” Interior Minister Christophe Castaner said this week. He cited protests in Prague in 2000; Genoa, Italy, in 2001, Rostock, Germany, in 2007; and London in 2009.

 

What has changed is that the message of the 1999 protest is also the message of the summit itself, “that the fruits of globalization are not being equally distributed,” said Tristen Naylor, deputy director of the G20 Research Group. “We find ourselves in this really peculiar moment where the grievances of those inside the summit room and those outside the security fence are aligned.”

 

For the men and women pitching tents in an overgrown field well outside the glitzy center of Biarritz, that alignment is a mirage.

 

“I am here to support the alternative, people who want to offer something different to the capitalistic world we live in,” said Laura Ochoa, a 31-year-old French teacher from Spain. “The G-7 is the exact opposite of what I believe.”

 

On Thursday, they staged a protest outside a McDonald’s, holding aloft a white banner describing the global fast-food chain as a “social insecurity zone.”