The Minister of Transport, Clément Beaune and Anne Hidalgo, mayor of Paris, will not attend Olympic events together.
The councilor wrote on Friday, December 8 to Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne to complain about the “unworthy” comments of the Minister of Transport, Clément Beaune. The latter declared that the mayor of Paris “spits on our country” when she says that transport “will not be ready” for the Olympic Games.
Beyond this pass of arms, to which we far prefer fencing, a sport which generally succeeds rather well for the French, this quarrel sums up quite well the feeling of many Ile-de-France residents, who feel excluded from the festival between injunctions to teleworking and avoiding this or that area. We can still be reassured, there is no question of confinement like at the height of the Covid crisis.
No certificates therefore but QR Codes to be able to circulate in certain security zones around the Olympic sites, a device that senators castigated as being “typical of a state of emergency”. On the very day of the ceremony, from Ivry to the Pont Garigliano, the Seine will be inaccessible and the Champs-Elysées axis will be completely closed off. We can obviously understand this but nevertheless find it a shame that the free places, numbering 500,000 initially, could fall below the level of 300,000.
The heavy current events are forcing the State to take drastic measures to avoid any tragedy, no question of being offended. The fact remains: these decisions which must protect us are in no way correlated with the exorbitant price of tickets which had already destroyed Tony Estanguet’s promise to make Paris 2024 “popular games”. If we add to this the increase in the price of the metro ticket during the Olympic period, from 2.10 euros to 4 euros. And if we take into account the price of a hotel room or an Airbnb, we then very quickly approach games reserved for an elite.
Come on, let’s stop grumbling at the risk of being scolded by Valérie Pécresse for whom “we have to open the chakras at some point, we are going to welcome the world and we are the only country that is not happy about it”. We are delighted about it, we even wanted to be able to participate without it costing us two hands.
