French President Emmanuel Macron said Tuesday in an interview with Le Parisien newspaper that he was determined to “piss off” the unvaccinated against COVID-19 “to the end” by “limiting for them, as much as possible, the access to social life activities ”.
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He also said he “wanted” to run for president in three months, without having “clarified the subject” for the moment.
“The unvaccinated, I really want to piss them off. And so we will continue to do so, until the end. This is the strategy ”, declares the Head of State, while a bill on the vaccination pass gives rise to a heated debate in the National Assembly.
To a question from a reader of Le Parisien stressing that the unvaccinated “occupy 85% of resuscitations”, which leads to a postponement of operations, Emmanuel Macron replies that this remark “is the best argument” for the government’s strategy and that “in a democracy, the worst enemy is lies and stupidity”.
“Almost all people, more than 90%, have adhered” to the vaccination and “it is a very small minority that is resistant”, he adds.
“That one, how do you reduce it?” We reduce it, sorry to say it, like that, by pissing it off even more. Me, I’m not for pissing off the French. I plague the administration all day long when it blocks them. Well there, the unvaccinated, I really want to piss them off, ”he continues.
“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.
He was speaking while the French deputies had resumed the debate on the vaccine pass, in an electric atmosphere after the 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, judged the president’s remarks “appalling”. “Does the president control what he says?” 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 ”.
At Les Républicains (right), Bruno Retailleau estimated that no “health emergency justifies such words”.
Counting on the vaccine, it is with caution that Emmanuel Macron evokes his probable candidacy in 2022. “I want to. As soon as there are the sanitary conditions which allow it and that I will have clarified this subject, in myself and in relation to the political equation, I will say what it is ”, he assured .