In France, anti-vax fury, politics make public service risky

In SainteAnastasie-sur-Issole, a village that curls catlike in verdant Provence hillocks, voters are making an early start on France’s presidential election.

From their ballot box this weekend and next will come the name of the candidate — picked from among dozens — who they want their mayor to endorse.

Normally, the choice would be Mayor Olivier Hoffmann’s alone, under a right that, at election time, turns small-potato public office-holders into hot properties — wooed by wouldbe candidates who need 500 endorsements from elected officials to get onto the April ballot.

But in an inflamed climate of election-time politics, and with fury among opponents of COVID-19 vaccinations increasingly bubbling over into violence directed at elected representatives, Sainte-Anastasie’s staunchly apolitical mayor doesn’t want to be seen taking sides.

Safer, he figures, to let the 2,000 villagers choose for him.

“I know lots and lots of people in the village, many are my friends, I don’t want to create tensions,” Hoffmann said in a phone interview. “So no politics.”

“Politics,” the mayor added, “often do more harm than good.”

Even in a country with ingrained traditions of violent contestation, where the revolutionaries of 1789 guillotined King Louis XVI and Queen Marie-Antoinette, an upsurge of physical and verbal attacks and online torrents of hatred directed at public officials — often, now, over COVID-19 policies — are ringing alarm bells.

Violence hasn’t approached the level of the storming of the U.S. Capitol by Donald Trump supporters in 2021. Nor have French lawmakers been killed like their counterparts in Britain. There, the fatal stabbing of a Member of Parliament in October prompted renewed national soul-searching about the safety of elected officials with a proud tradition of readily meeting voters.