Liberté, égalité, vacciné: France’s Covid passport revolt is just beginning

Three weeks ago, 100,000 demonstrators turned out on the streets of France to protest President Emmanuel Macron’s hastily passed law to require vaccination passports to get on a train, eat at a restaurant or visit a shopping centre. A week later, the number had more than doubled. Last Saturday, it doubled again. One police union estimated that close to 500,000 had turned out, although as usual the Interior Ministry claimed a much lower number. Enormous demonstrations were staged not just in Paris but in more than 150 cities and towns across France, as well as in the overseas territories of Guadeloupe and Réunion.

All this in the middle of the sacred summer holiday season. On the current trajectory, one million could be on the streets by September. With eight months to go before the first round of the presidential election, Macron and his ministers have kindled a national revolt. It could be as prolonged and divisive as the revolt of the gilets jaunes, which only stopped in March last year after the first wave of Covid.

Ministers are still pouring petrol on the flames. This week, the health minister dismissed protestors as ‘a magma of anti-vax, anti-science and anti-state’ activists. With the connivance of a tame media, officials have painted protestors as dangerous, ultra right-wing extremists.

On Monday, a protestor who on Saturday was photographed carrying a sign denouncing, inter alia, Macron, Klaus Schwab, Bernard Henri-Lévy and George Soros was described as anti-Semitic by the interior minister, an allegation instantly and uncritically repeated by BFMTV, Macron’s ever-loyal news channel. By nightfall she was in a police cell.

Anyone outside of France can be forgiven for misreading the mood here. The deliberate demonisation of protestors is enthusiastically relayed by foreign journalists parroting the lines fed to them by Elysée flacks.