It is a pendulum movement, like a tennis player running from left to right to catch up with his opponent’s attacks. After criticism from the radical left of the “mismanagement” of the Olympic Games, linked in particular to around fifteen million euros invested in booklets distributed to schoolchildren, the far right is in turn raving about the Olympic Games. Indirect participation in the Islamization of France, argues Guillaume Peltier, executive of Reconquête, “invisibilization of our identity” and “wokism” affirms the RN deputy Nicolas Meizonnet… The object of their fury? The official poster for the Games, unveiled on March 4, which contains neither the French flag nor the cross on the dome of the Invalides. The opportunity seemed too good not to make the event the receptacle of their political obsessions. A bit like Putin’s Russia seeks to deepen fractures in Western societies to weaken them, French populists are using the Olympics as a pretext to polemicize against the government. Makes you wonder if they even want the success of the competition.
Remember that France will have ample opportunity to highlight its history and heritage during the events. It is even with this objective of promoting the country that Emmanuel Macron and the organizing committee made most of their choices, from the opening ceremony on the Seine to the horse riding events at the Palace of Versailles. As for the Olympic poster, it certainly does not reproduce a tricolor flag or a Christian symbol. Created by the designer Ugo Gattoni, it nevertheless magnificently highlights Paris and the cradle of Western civilization. A nod to the world of science fiction, the design combines the Eiffel Tower, the Stade de France, the Grand Palais and many other Parisian buildings in a setting reminiscent of Greek Atlantis.
Let’s continue the fiction a little: let’s imagine France, in a few months, giving up the Olympic Games, transferred at the last minute to the city of Frankfurt, in Germany. The same people who do not have harsh enough words today, on the contours of the competition, would certainly cry disaster, humiliation of the Nation. It seems that the problem is not the event, but more simply the fact that it is not them who are responsible for organizing it.