One month before the opening, the Paris Olympics find themselves sucked into the French political crisis after the surprise convening of legislative elections with uncertain consequences while France must welcome the whole world.
By deciding to dissolve the Assembly, following an electoral slap for the presidential camp and nearly 40% of votes for far-right parties, Emmanuel Macron launched a high-risk election just before an Olympic edition, an unprecedented situation according to specialists.
The Socialist Party mayor of the host city, Anne Hidalgo, described this decision taken before the Olympics as “extremely disturbing”. Because as much on the right as on the left, in communities and in government, it is the sacred union around the Olympics which has taken precedence for several years.
“Protect the Olympics from political turbulence”
Well aware of the risk of sending the French to the polls three weeks before the Olympics, in a fractured France and with a possible scenario of it being ungovernable, the president of the Republican party of the Île-de-France region, Valérie Pécresse, she bluntly called for “an Olympic truce”.
At the head of the transport organization Île-de-France Mobilités, a crucial issue for the Games, she summoned her troops “to show national unity around these Games and to protect them from political turbulence”. A right-wing candidate during the last presidential election, she is currently seeing her party torn apart because its president has decided on an alliance with the National Rally (RN).
So the President of the IOC, Thomas Bach, may have repeated “no worries” for two weeks, but the Olympics find themselves thrown into the political arena.
They even become an electoral argument for Emmanuel Macron, for whom the French will “integrate them into their choice”. Claiming to Matignon, the president of the RN, Jordan Bardella, retorted that he would not change anything about their organization if he came to power.
In reality, the French were just starting to take an interest in the Olympic thing, particularly since the arrival of the Olympic flame in Marseille on May 8.
The head of the Olympic Games Tony Estanguet accepts this and wants to be reassuring by explaining that “the main decisions” have already been taken. The fact remains that the chief VRP of the Games sees the pre-Olympics completely eaten away by an electoral campaign and his champion’s nerves put to the test.
“Estanguet, he doesn’t have an election, the calendars are not the same,” those around him are accustomed to saying to explain a certain distrust of the former Céist towards the elected officials. The calendars are collapsing. “It must be green,” several sources in the Olympic ecosystem told AFP.
“1936 Olympic Games”
It is especially after the second round that is worrying.
“If July 8 is Bardella, it will be astounding,” explains a political source to AFP. Who will be in charge on the evening of the opening ceremony on the Seine on July 26, sitting with all the foreign heads of state? Where will the Minister of the Interior, Gérald Darmanin, who spent hours preparing to secure this event? Not in the government in the event of defeat of the presidential majority, he has already warned.
“There are clearly questions that arise if the RN wins,” explains a police source, fearing urban clashes.
A pocket of resistance to the RN, which made less than 10%, Paris “is a city of hope”, explained Anne Hidalgo. “Come, this is a place where we will continue to breathe,” she said in response to those “who are worried about the French situation”.
The Olympic truce, very little for former champion Guy Drut.
Member of the IOC, and former Minister of Sports under Jacques Chirac, he assures that “there was no reason for things to go badly with an RN government”, saying he is a supporter of an alliance between LR and the RN.
“The Olympics are going to go well. The attacks in Munich in 1972 did not prevent the Games from taking place,” he even told Le Monde. “Guy Drut’s comments are his own responsibility,” the organizing committee responded to AFP. This outing also outraged the Minister of the Olympic Games, Amélie Oudéa-Castéra, who could no longer be minister when the Games begin.
Former advisor to François Mitterrand, and former supporter of Emmanuel Macron, Jacques Attali does not mince his words regarding this dissolution: “Doing this before the Olympic Games is scandalous. We were supposed to have the 1924 Olympics, we are going to have those of 1936,” he said in an interview with the daily Libération.