Emmanuel Macron generates outrage in France by confessing that he wants to “annoy” the unvaccinated

The French President, Emmanuel Macron, generated indignation in France this Wednesday after confessing his willingness to “bother to the end” those who were not vaccinated for covid-19, three months before the presidential elections.

“To the unvaccinated, I really want to annoy them. And that we will continue to do, until the end. This is the strategy ”, acknowledged Macron in an interview with the newspaper Le Parisien and published on Tuesday.

The liberal president used the verb “emmerder” in French, a colloquial register that surprises a head of state and which can be translated as “fuck”, “bother”, “annoy” or “complicate life”.

His statements unleashed a storm in the political class, from the radical left to the extreme right, and fueled his image of arrogance.

They also helped to suspend again the debate in the National Assembly, where the government is majority, on the approval of a vaccination passport to replace the current health passport.

The executive wants this new measure to be applied in mid-January in the country, immersed in a severe fifth wave that on Tuesday caused 271,686 new cases to be registered in 24 hours, a record number.

If approved, those over 12 years of age without vaccination will not be able to go to restaurants, museums, gyms, cinemas or use certain transport, even if they present a negative diagnostic test of less than 24 hours.

“It is not up to the President of the Republic to choose between good and bad French,” the candidate of the right-wing Republican party for the presidency, Valérie Pécresse, assured CNews, who said she was “outraged.”

Pécresse, who some polls gave the winner of the presidential election against the current president after his appointment in December, also called on the French to “end the five-year period of contempt.”

The ultra-rightist presidential leaders, well positioned in the polls, did not hesitate to attack the “violence”, in the words of Marine Le Pen, of the president, who seeks “to exist in the campaign”, according to another aspiring president, Éric Zemmour.

The socialist candidate, the mayor of Paris Anne Hidalgo, and the communist Fabien Roussel questioned their willingness to “unite” the French. Leftist Jean-Luc Mélenchon denounced a “mind-boggling confession of Macron”.

– “War declaration” –

Since coming to power in 2017, this 44-year-old former banker and former minister has tried to erase his image as an insolent politician close to the elites, although his term is peppered with controversial phrases.

In an interview in December, the president justified these controversies by his “willingness to shake up” the system, as when he assured that in “train stations you come across people who have been successful and people who are nothing.”

His controversial statements about the poor or unemployed also served as a catalyst during the “yellow vest” demonstrations between 2018 and 2019, which emerged after a fuel price hike but ended up being a much broader protest movement.

The political scientist Jérôme Fourquet ruled out on France Info radio that this new statement “forcibly” passed an electoral bill to him, but warned of the resurgence of tension.

“Some of the unvaccinated people may consider it as a kind of last provocation or as a declaration of war,” said the expert from the Ifop polling institute.

At Le Parisien, Macron explained that more than 90% of the French have already been vaccinated, but that there is still a minority against it. “How do we reduce this minority? We reduce it, sorry to say so, annoying it even more”, he added.

The French president seeks to stop the new peak of infections before confirming his candidacy for reelection, something that his relatives, such as former Prime Minister Edouard Philippe, take for granted, but that the head of state is reluctant to announce.

His predecessor in office, the socialist François Hollande, resigned in 2017 to run for a second term, in a context of very low popularity. Hollande had arrived at the Elysee in 2012 after defeating the outgoing president, the conservative Nicolas Sarkozy.