PARIS – The rumors are true: Going to the bathroom in France can be confusing and political.
As many American tourists have discovered, the French toilet is not always in the same room as the bathroom. WC à la Turk – a squat toilet, a ceramic hole in the floor, essentially – still haunts French highway rest areas up and down the country. In a certain light, bidets resemble indoor birdbaths.
Now, in a new twist on French bathroom etiquette, some Parisians are talking about openly defecating in the city’s famous Seine River, after President Emmanuel Macron and Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo announced they were making it safe for some swimming events. Will take a dip in waterways to prove it. At the 2024 Paris Olympic Games.
Plans for the mass defecation program have been circulating online for weeks.
Parisians are not only troubled by the huge amount of money that France has spent on cleaning the river, which is rumored to be $1 billion. They are also angry at Macron for allowing the pressure on public transport, security risks caused by the Games starting next month, and generally for allowing the rise of the far-right National Rally party in France.
Macron’s decision to call snap parliamentary elections starting on Sunday, with a second round on July 7, in response to recent far-right gains in EU elections, has further incensed some Parisians.
“I’m happy the Games are happening. I’m a big fan of sports,” said Leo Lallier, 27, who works in real estate as he returned to work on Wednesday. It’s been a hundred years since Paris last hosted the Games. Are.” Cross the Pont Alexandre III, a 19th-century arch bridge that spans the Seine with sweeping views of the Eiffel Tower.
“But the Olympics also have some negative aspects,” Lallier said. “Many roads around here are blocked. This is causing problems for taxis and Uber drivers,” he said. He added, “There’s no way I’m swimming in the Seine.”
Till Wednesday there was neither a president nor a mayor.
He had in fact vowed to contest the election on 23 June, but backed out at the last minute citing “political reasons”, likely due to the upcoming election, which many in France are worried about. For the first time since World War II, France’s far right is on the verge of seizing political power, although Macron’s role as president is not in danger unless he chooses to resign – which he says he will do. Will not do this.
More:France’s Macron gambles on snap election as far-right parties gain lead in EU Parliament vote
Macron and Hidalgo’s pledge to prove the river’s cleanliness sparked an online campaign with a website and a hashtag that is technically now out of date but not necessarily out of step with the times: #JeChieDansLaSeineLe23Juin. It translates as, “I am in the Seine on June 23rd.”
The website, which is still operational, features a strap-line that reads: “Because after we put us in sex it’s up to them to bathe in our sex.” The website also features a tool where users can enter how far they live from central Paris to calculate when and where they will need to defecate in the Seine, which is several hundred miles away in Dijon. It passes through, so that the garbage reaches there. Central Paris at noon on 23 June.
The creator of the campaign remains anonymous. However, according to French media he is a computer programmer who is angered not only by the Seine’s cleanup bill but also by Markan’s failure to address inequality, poverty and rising community tensions.
“The problem is that all the resources invested are not enough to solve all the social problems we have at the moment,” the programmer told Actu Paris. “We feel abandoned. We see where their priorities were.”
Macron promised a new kind of consensual politics when he became president in 2017. The Olympics were intended to end the years in which France’s so-called “Yellow Vest” movement had paralyzed the country with declining living standards and attacks on fuel taxes. , Last summer France was rocked by violent protests over police brutality and looting.
Clean, or clean enough?
Still, in a sign that Macron and Hidalgo’s swim may still happen, USA TODAY spotted two different water testers taking samples on Wednesday.
One was Lionel Chaylas, 47, who works for the US-based environmental non-profit Surfrider France.
Cheyllus was collecting samples from France’s most famous river with the aid of a long stick and a small beaker at the end.
More:French President Emmanuel Macron is confident that the opening ceremony of the Olympics will be safe
Their tests showed that the Seine’s water quality was improving after large-scale cleanup – but was still not safe. All boats on the river whose waste systems were not connected to any kind of disposal network were now connected. Similarly, there were houses and apartments on the river also. A new waste water treatment plant was built.
But Cheylas said the new systems are only recently beginning to take effect and, perhaps more worryingly, he said, officials were testing for only two types of bacteria: E. coli and enterococci. The concentration of E. coli was found to be above the safe limit in samples collected on June 10.
“European regulations say only those two bacteria need to be monitored. Nothing about pharmaceutical pollution. Nothing about industrial pollution or chemical pollution,” he told USA TODAY. “What this means is that when you say, ‘Yes, this water is swimmable,’ that only means those two bacteria” are at safe levels for athletes.
More:Seine River water pollution levels still well above limits a month before the Paris Olympics
A senior International Olympic Committee official said earlier this month that there was “no reason to doubt” that Olympic races involving the Seine would go on as scheduled. “We are confident that we will swim in the Seine this summer,” IOC official Christophe Duby said in an online briefing on June 13.
“The scene can be very dirty in a lot of different ways,” Cheylus said.
“I’ve never seen anyone swim in it.”
“Maybe drunk sometimes.”
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