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Health pass credited with turning around France’s Covid vaccination rate

Despite weekly protests, France's "Covid health pass" has helped turn the country, once a vaccine laggard, into a leader and has the support of most people ahead of presidential polls next year.

Health pass credited with turning around France's Covid vaccination rate
The health pass has boosted the French government's popularity. Photo: Ludovic MARIN / AFP.

Seven weeks after it was announced by President Emmanuel Macron, French people are now used to being asked to show their credentials as they enter restaurants, bars, gyms or museums – and polls show a majority in favour of the checks.

The system requires everyone to prove that they have been either vaccinated or recently tested negative for Covid-19, or have recovered from the illness in the last six months.

“At the beginning, it wasn’t a given that it would work,” said Djillali Annane, a doctor and professor who heads the intensive care unit of the Raymond-Poincare de Garches hospital in the Paris region.

“People have understood it, it’s relatively well respected and it’s contributing undeniably in keeping the fourth wave in check for the moment.”

Though criticised as discriminating against the unvaccinated, it has given France’s efforts to innoculate its population a sustained boost since mid-July, with millions rushing to get jabbed in order to avoid regular testing.

Measured by the proportion of citizens who have received at least one dose, France overtook the United States and Germany in late July and early August and has surpassed Britain and Italy in recent days, according to official data analysed by AFP.

The country has given at least one dose to 72.1 percent of its population and, with Sweden and Finland, is vaccinating at the joint highest rate in the EU: the equivalent of 0.6 percent of the population receives a jab each day.

It still has ground to make up on Europe’s top vaccinators such as Spain, Malta and Portugal, where more than 80 percent of people have received a first dose, while Canada remains above France in the G7 grouping of rich countries.

Political boost

For Macron, who is expected to seek a second term in presidential elections next April, the generally positive response to the pass system has helped boost the government, polls show.

Between 64-77 percent of people support the pass, while confidence in the government’s handling of the health crisis is at its highest level since the pandemic began, according to recent surveys by the Elabe group.

Bernard Sananes, the head of Elabe, told AFP that the 43-year-old head of state remains a “fragile favourite” for next year’s unpredictable polls when his record on Covid-19 will be under scrutiny.

“He gives the impression of having come through the crisis so far, having had some difficult moments — but without leaving any space for an alternative, for someone to say ‘so-and-so would have done it better’,” he explained.

READ ALSO 6 reasons France’s Covid vaccination programme improved so dramatically

At the start of the year, when France made an embarrassingly slow start to jabbing people, many pundits saw Macron’s future as being on the line.

Other controversies such as a lack of masks at the beginning of the crisis have given ammunition to his opponents, including far-right leader Marine Le Pen.

Ideological opposition?

The health pass system has provoked anger in some quarters, leading to street demonstrations every Saturday where opponents denounce the president for turning France into a “dictatorship”.

Some unvaccinated protesters have even worn large yellow stars, comparing themselves to persecuted Jews during World War II, a parallel that has been criticised by Holocaust survivors.

Partly because of these excesses, the protest movement has never drawn broad public support, unlike others during Macron’s turbulent time in office, particularly the anti-government “yellow vest” movement in 2018-19.

“For most people, getting your phone out at the entrance to a restaurant has become a daily habit. They’ve not followed the protesters into the realm of an ideological debate,” Sananes said.

The opposition is “a minority, but not marginal”, drawing support from around 20-25 percent of French people, he said.

With schools and offices reopening after the summer holidays, doctors are bracing for a possible rise in cases which are averaging about 17,000 daily.

The momentum in vaccination efforts is also expected to fade in the weeks ahead, while fewer checks and increased cheating could also undermine the effectiveness of the health pass system.

Epidemiologist Catherine Hill says that all the Covid-19 indicators are trending downwards – from infection rates to the number of deaths – but there are still around 19 million unvaccinated people, half of them children under 12.

“The vector within the epidemic is going to be unvaccinated people. There’s a reservoir of nearly 20 million of them in which the virus can continue to circulate,” she told AFP.

And whatever the short-term successes, “we’re at the mercy of a new variant”, she added.

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FRENCH ELECTIONS

French election breakdown: TV clash, polling latest and ‘poo’ Le Pen

From the polls latest to the first big TV election clash, via a lot of questions about the French Constitution and the president's future - here's the situation 17 days on from Emmanuel Macron's shock election announcement.

French election breakdown: TV clash, polling latest and 'poo' Le Pen

During the election period we will be publishing a bi-weekly ‘election breakdown’ to help you keep up with the latest developments. You can receive these as an email by going to the newsletter section here and selecting subscribe to ‘breaking news alerts’.

It’s now been 17 days since Macron’s surprise call for snap parliamentary elections, and four days until the first round of voting.

TV debates

The hotly-anticipated first TV debate of the election on Tuesday night turned out to be an ill-tempered affair with a lot of interruptions and men talking over each other.

The line of the night went to the left representative Manuel Bompard – who otherwise struggled to make much of an impact – when he told far-right leader Jordan Bardella (whose Italian ancestors migrated to France several generations back): “When your personal ancestors arrived in France, your political ancestors said exactly the same thing to them. I find that tragic.”

But perhaps the biggest question of all is whether any of this matters? The presidential election debate between Macron and Marine Le Pen back in 2017 is widely credited with influencing the campaign as Macron exposed her contradictory policies and economic illiteracy.

However a debate ahead of the European elections last month between Bardella and prime minister Gabriel Attal was widely agreed to have been ‘won’ by Attal, who also managed to expose flaws and contradictions in the far right party’s policies. Nevertheless, the far-right went on to convincingly beat the Macronists at the polls.

Has the political scene simply moved on so that Bardella’s brief and fact-light TikTok videos convince more people than a two-hour prime-time TV debate?

You can hear the team from The Local discussing all the election latest on the Talking France podcast – listen here or on the link below

Road to chaos

Just over two weeks ago when Macron called this election, he intended to call the bluff of the French electorate – did they really want a government made up of Marine Len Pen’s far-right Rassemblement National (RN) party?

Well, latest polling suggests that a large portion of French people want exactly that, and significantly fewer people want to continue with a Macron government.

With the caveat that pollsters themselves say this is is a difficult election to call, current polling suggests RN would take 35 percent of the vote, the leftist alliance Nouveau Front Populaire 30 percent and Macron’s centrists 20 percent.

This is potentially bad news for everyone, as those figures would give no party an overall majority in parliament and would instead likely usher in an era of political chaos.

The questions discussed in French conversation and media have now moved on from ‘who will win the election?’ to distinctly more technical concerns like – what exactly does the Constitution say about the powers of a president without a government? Can France have a ‘caretaker government’ in the long term? Is it time for a 6th republic?.

The most over-used phrase in French political discourse this week? Sans précédent (unprecedented).

Démission

From sans précédent to sans président – if this election leads to total chaos, will Macron resign? It’s certainly being discussed, but he says he will not.

For citizens of many European parliamentary democracies it seems virtually automatic that the president would resign if he cannot form a government, but the French system is very different and several French presidents have continued in post despite being obliged to appoint an opponent as prime minister.

READ ALSO Will Macron resign in case of an election disaster?

The only president of the Fifth Republic to resign early was Charles de Gaulle – the trigger was the failure of a referendum on local government, but it may be that he was simply fed up; he was 78 years old and had already been through an attempted coup and the May 1968 general strike which paralysed the country. He died a year after leaving office.

Caca craft

She might be riding high in the polls, but not everyone is enamoured of Le Pen, it seems, especially not in ‘lefty’ eastern Paris – as seen by this rather neatly crafted Marine Le Pen flag stuck into a lump of dog poo left on the pavement.

Thanks to spotter Helen Massy-Beresford, who saw this in Paris’s 20th arrondissement.

You can find all the latest election news HERE, or sign up to receive these election breakdowns as an email by going to the newsletter section here and selecting subscribe to ‘breaking news alerts’.

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