A hospital pass
Emmanuel Macron’s Covid passports have united the opposition in a way not seen in France since the gilets jaunes
When pollster Antoine Bristielle went to look first-hand at the latest protests against President Emmanuel Macron’s latest Covid restrictions, it was the sheer mix of the demonstrators that stood out.
Bristielle, director of the Opinion Observatory at the Jean-jaures Foundation think tank, says Parisians sporting patriotic symbols such as the tricolore mingled with those brandishing the Gaullist Cross of Lorraine amid four separate protests in the French capital.
“There was a mix of old and young people, which is really striking when you go to a demonstration. There was a lot of heterogeneity there,” he says.
The cause of their ire, scuffles at the Moulin Rouge and the gendarmes’ tear gas is the extension of the deeply unpopular pass sanitaire, or health pass. The French president introduced it last month in a bid to boost France’s lagging vaccination rate.
But, from today, visitors to cafés, restaurants and even the nation’s famed outdoor terraces will be met with the command of “vos papiers, s’il vous plait” in order to be served.
The measure, first introduced to nightclubs and venues with more than 50 people, will also be extended to hotels and holiday resorts, as well as long distance travel.
The new restrictions are accompanied with a diktat that some 1.5m health workers in 70 professions should be vaccinated by midseptember on pain of suspension without pay, a heavy-handed measure that brought unions out on strike.
The presence of the gilets jaunes, or “yellow vests”, among the latest turbulence will be a concern for a president facing a fight with Marine Le Pen to stay in the Élysée Palace in less than nine months.
The protests against the health pass, which Le Pen has called “brutal and illegal”, have started on a small scale, but then so did the gilets jaunes. What began as a hi vis-clad demonstration against fuel taxes swelled into a wider movement against an imperial president.
An estimated 200,000 people were on the streets across France last week at about 200 protests, according to Bristielle, with numbers growing over the three weekends of protests thus far. His polling suggests similar characteristics between the gilets jaunes and the protesters against Macron’s “health dictatorship”. He says: “The movement of today is quite close to the same [gilet jaune] people, much more coming from the lower classes than the upper classes – and it’s people also who usually don’t go to vote, or when they do go, they vote for an anti-establishment party.” If you are a gilet jaune, you are much more likely to be against the health pass.
The protests are also tapping into a much deeper anti-authoritarian streak in the French psyche. “The French don’t like being obliged to do something,” according to Daniela Ordonez, chief France economist at Oxford Economics.
Strangely enough for the country that gave the world Louis Pasteur, the father of modern immunology, France has the lowest share of its population fully-vaccinated among all G7 nations except Japan. Just 48pc is doublejabbed, compared to 57pc in the UK and 60pc in Canada, according to the Our World in Data database.
Macron has had an undistinguished pandemic and is also up against a cultural hurdle as anti-vaccine sentiment plays a much bigger part in mainstream public discourse following a succession of health scandals dating back decades.
In 1991, the government was found to have given blood contaminated with hepatitis C and HIV to more than 1,000 haemophiliacs, leading to hundreds of deaths and manslaughter charges against three former ministers in 1999.
In the same decade, a vaccination programme in schools for hepatitis B
– a notorious infant and teenage killer – was suspended after 250 cases of multiple sclerosis among vaccinated patients, although studies failed to make the link definitively.
More recently, the €1bn spent on swine flu vaccines in 2009 in anticipation of a pandemic that never arrived turned up the heat on thenand president Nicolas Sarkozy in an episode perceived as benefiting big pharma rather than the public, fuelling the concerns of the anti-vaxxers.
Macron has taken to social media in a bid to assuage fears over the jab, posting casually dressed videos on Tiktok and Instagram from his summer base on the French Riviera in a bid to dispel myths about the vaccine describing it as “the only weapon we have” against the virus.
Yet according to Bristielle’s most recent polling, 17pc will not take up the vaccine, while more than 40pc support the recent protests.
In September, France will also introduce €49 (£41) charges for previously free PCR tests, further raising the hackles of the hesitant. “If you have been refusing the vaccine, it’s going to be a lot more difficult to prove your negative status,” says Capital Economics’ Jessica Hinds.
So far at least, the direct economic impact of the protests is minuscule. Even at their height, the long-running gilet jaune protests of 2018-9 only knocked about 0.3 percentage points off the economy – half the impact of transport strikes in early 2018. Oxford’s Ordonez can still get the subway in Paris every day but is nonetheless monitoring the development of the protests closely for wider effects.
France’s economy is expected to advance by 2-3pc in the current quarter, after disappointing 0.9pc growth between April and June impacted by lockdown.
Ordonez adds: “This movement can impact the economy through consumer behaviour, because of the news, what you see, how you feel, behaviour can change. We expect consumers to spend most of their accumulated savings over the next three or four months. If their confidence begins to weaken, because they feel anti-vax sentiment and they prefer to wait to spend the savings, this can actually have a real impact and change the profile of the recovery. It could be more gradual with lower demand and more bankruptcies.”
David Page, head of research at AXA Investment Management, notes the surge of some 6m jabs since the health pass was announced and added that Macron faced a potential trade-off in his bid for re-election: “The policy introduced now may create tensions in France over the next couple of months. However, if it leads to a situation where France has more vaccinations, and you get a stronger economic recovery going into the second quarter of next year, that’s much more likely to deliver a market-friendly election outcome.”
That said, after low-turnout regional elections in June where both main parties failed to make headway, Macron has a 55pc-45pc poll edge – too small for comfort. Experts say a key difference between the current turbulence and the gilets jaune era is that it was easier for opponents to back provincial France against an overmighty centre, than make a play for the anti-vax vote for the risk of losing support elsewhere.
The biggest risk for Macron, says Bristielle, is that the pass sanitaire demonstrations balloon into “a debate about democracy rather than health”.
‘There was a mix of old and young people, which is really striking when you go to a demo’