Olympics set to be Macron’s final humiliation Article by The Daily Telegraph

Writing in The Daily Telegraph, Anne-Elisabeth Moutet describes problems associated with the Olympic Games, which will begin in France’s capital Paris on July 26. Caliber.Az reprints the article.

According to the article, a crowd of journalists, officials, photographers and TV cameras was convened earlier this week on Quai des Célestins, opposite the Île Saint Louis, in the heart of historical Paris, by Mayor Anne Hidalgo’s 400-strong Communications Office, to watch her fulfil her twice-delayed promise of swimming in the Seine.

Yet most of them were aware that the publicity-crazed mayor had been beaten to it three days before by the minister for sports and the Olympics, Amélie Oudéa-Castera, a former tennis champion. She took her own dip in the river next to another body in a state of flux, the French National Assembly.

As much as an effort to prove the Seine’s cleanliness for the Olympics outdoor swimming events, the minister, soon to leave with the rest of the Cabinet, was making a parting statement about Hidalgo, who from the start tried to make the 2024 Games all about herself. “She thrives on antagonism,” Oudéa-Castera told Le Monde newspaper. “She’s jealous and has a rather complicated relationship with women. Ever since I was named at the Ministry [two years before], she tried to size me up, to judge me, to look down on me, to wrongfoot me. Well… she’s seen I can stick it out.”

It can be argued that Hidalgo’s 10-minute easy crawl in the Seine was almost forced on her after that, but questions remain about the river’s water quality. The respected investigative site Médiapart, which has been monitoring pollution levels, says both minister and mayor benefited from a one-off lowering of these, thanks to reduced rainfall. Samples carried out on four points of the river on the Olympic sites for three consecutive days are more worrying: Escherichia coli and enterococci bacteria still exceed health safety thresholds, they state. Whether the triathlon, open water swimming and paratriathlon competitions will actually take place remains uncertain.

This is not good news for Emmanuel Macron after he had to accept the resignation of his prime minister and entire government. The president hoped his party would be able to cling on after the snap election he called last month, but the ensuing deadlock is now creating too much pressure on him. Gabriel Attal, Macron’s 35-year-old former “protégé”, now bitter enemy (and rival) had to be begged by an embattled Macron to stay on a few weeks more as prime minister, in a caretaker role to oversee the upcoming Games.

The Olympics was supposed to be Macron’s crowning moment. Instead, it has been, and still is, plagued with terrible headlines and huge disruption for Parisians. From the 44,000 eight-foot steel fences erected to segregate the Olympic areas from the rest of the city, forcing pedestrians to walk for hundreds of metres just to cross a street; to the white-painted “Olympic Lanes” forbidden to any traffic, even bikes, in order to whizz athletes, officials and sponsors between locations while the rest of the city is in a perpetual traffic jam, the city is in a state of barely-repressed rage.

Shopkeepers and hoteliers alike complain that, far from benefiting from the promised Olympic bonanza, they are losing business compared to an ordinary year. And that’s even before the terrorism threat, the thousands of workers barred from necessary jobs by the security services for “dubious associations”, and the political football eagerly seized by new hard-left France Insoumise MPs, who claim these will be the “Olympics for the Rich”. As a legacy, it looks terrible.