Three months before the presidential election, French President Emmanuel Macron, decided to “piss off” the unvaccinated, sparked an outcry in Parliament where the government is struggling to pass a text establishing a vaccine passport to fight COVID- 19.
“The unvaccinated, I really want to piss them off. And so we will continue to do so, until the end. That’s the strategy, ”said the French head of state in an interview with the daily The Parisian.
“I’m not going to put them in jail, I’m not going to forcibly vaccinate them. And so, you have to tell them: from January 15, you will no longer be able to go to the restaurant, you will no longer be able to take a cannon, you will no longer be able to go for a coffee, you will no longer be able to go to the theater, you will no longer be able to take a cannon. no longer going to the movies… ”, explains the president.
Words that immediately rocked the National Assembly and forced the session president to suspend work in the middle of the night Wednesday because of the chaos caused in the hemicycle by these statements.
However, the deputies had resumed their discussions on the vaccination pass more or less calmly, after a surprise vote refusing the continuation of the debates on the night of Monday to Tuesday.
The candidate of La France insoumise (radical left) for the presidential election, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, considered these remarks “appalling”. “Does the president know what he is saying? The WHO (World Health Organization) says + convince rather than coerce +. And him ? + Piss off more +. Appalling, ”he denounced in a tweet.
For Marine Le Pen, the candidate of the National Rally (far right), “a president should not say that. The guarantor of the unity of the nation persists in dividing it and assumes that he wants to make the unvaccinated second-class citizens. Emmanuel Macron is unworthy of his position ”.
Simple formality
The examination of the draft law on the vaccine pass, one of the pillars of Emmanuel Macron’s health policy, had to be suspended overnight from Monday to Tuesday when it should have been only a simple formality, a majority of parliamentarians supporting the text.
After the resumption of work, the deputies raised to 16 years the threshold required for the vaccination passport, against 12 in the initial project of the government, which rallied to this change. Discussions are expected to continue on Wednesday.
In the midst of the epidemic’s outbreak, the government initially aimed for final adoption at the end of the week, before coming into force on January 15. But 125 deputies – against 121 – refused, by a show of hands, the continuation of the debates, for lack of parliamentarians of the center-right majority in sufficient number.
Government spokesman Gabriel Attal defended a text “absolutely necessary”, while more than 19,600 COVID-19 patients were hospitalized Monday evening in France. 297 patients have died in the last 24 hours in hospitals.
More than 270,000 new cases have been recorded in the country in the past 24 hours, a new record, health authorities said.
Three months before the first round of the presidential election, this quack gave rise to strong criticism, on the right and on the left.
“Amateurs one day, always amateurs”, mocked the president of the LR group (right, opposition) in the National Assembly, Damien Abad, welcoming this “big snub for the majority (…) being outvoted”.
With the vaccination passport, the government wants to further increase the pressure on the nearly five million French people over the age of 12 who have not been vaccinated: for lack of being able to justify a full vaccination status, they will no longer have access to leisure activities, restaurants, bars, fairs or interregional public transport.