The synthetic "politics of emptying" of Olympic Paris stirred to the periphery

Paris seeks to pamper its image for the Olympic and Paralympic Games in the summer of 2024.

Oliver Thansan
Oliver Thansan
02 June 2023 Friday 22:21
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The synthetic "politics of emptying" of Olympic Paris stirred to the periphery

Paris seeks to pamper its image for the Olympic and Paralympic Games in the summer of 2024. The city of luxury and glamour, culture, fashion and joie de vivre, does not want to spoil this universal myth by the abundant presence of homelessness in its streets and improvised camps for foreigners in an irregular situation.

The "emptying policy", according to the unhappy expression of the Housing Minister himself, Olivier Klein, before the National Assembly, is being controversial because there is opposition in rural and peripheral areas designated to temporarily house the homeless and process, if In the case of foreigners, their regulation or their expulsion from the national territory is appropriate. Voluntary repatriation will be compensated with 1,200 euros.

The government order to the prefects came in mid-March. The objective was to have reception structures for the homeless who are transferred from Paris and the region that surrounds it, Île de France. It is estimated that some 100,000 homeless people accumulate in this area, half of France as a whole. They don't always live on the street. A part is located in shelters or emergency residences – often hotels – paid for by the State. When the Olympic Games approach, with the massive influx of visitors and hotels full to the brim, the homeless would be an additional problem. Not only will tourists have to be housed, but also thousands of police and military officers who will ensure the security of the sporting event.

The decision to send the homeless out of the capital has unnerved many and reinforces resentment towards the official Paris that always gives priority to its own. This discontent in the periphery, especially in rural areas, with respect to the center was one of the root causes of the long revolt of the yellow vests in 2018 and 2019.

Excluded from the distribution of the Parisian homeless are the Hauts de France region –already saturated by migrants trying to cross the English Channel to settle in the United Kingdom– and Corsica. The insular peculiarity – and the irritation even towards the continental French who have their second residence there – means that the arrival of homelessness could lead to public order problems.

The planned accommodation for the homeless has put the mayors of small communities in Brittany, such as Bruz, with 18,000 inhabitants on a war footing. They complain of being victims of unilateral and vertical decisions, of fait accompli. In Saint-Jean-le-Vieux, in the Ain department near Switzerland, popular pressure has succeeded in defeating the purpose of setting up a reception center in a 12th-century castle. There have also been signature campaigns in La Trinité, near Nice, and in Saint-Lys, in the Haute-Garonne.

A few days ago, the mayor of the coastal town of Saint-Brevin-les-Pins (Loire-Atlantique department), Yannick Morez, resigned due to the harassment of extreme right-wing elements who came to set fire to his house because the mayor intended to put a migrant asylum center near the population. The Morez case was a national political scandal.

It is evident that controversies such as the distribution of foreigners without papers give strength to parties such as Marine Le Pen's National Regroupment (RN), which draws mostly on the vote of the rural and impoverished middle and lower-middle classes.

The Government does not openly explain that the decision to "empty" Paris of homelessness and irregular foreigners has to do directly with the Olympic Games or with the Rugby World Cup, which will be held in September and October of this year, also in the capital. . They try to argue that the Paris region suffers from an unsustainable management problem, and that the mass relocation, for humanitarian reasons, was inevitable. But it is an open secret that the calendar is conditioned by sporting events.

The French government bore international shame for the chaos that ensued in the Champions League final last year. Apart from the mess that occurred with the tickets, there were disproportionate police charges and many fans were assaulted at the exit of the match between Liverpool and Real Madrid. The rugby World Cup and the athletics competitions of the Games will be held in the same Stade de France, located in Seine-Saint-Denis, a poor and problematic department, bordering Paris to the north.

The most degraded neighborhoods in the municipality of Paris are also located in the north, next to the périphérique, the highway that encircles the city. They are areas of the 18th and 19th arrondissements. The Ministry of the Interior and the police prefecture have regularly organized clean-up operations for years. They dismantle makeshift camps and drive out the dealers and users of crack, a devastating drug endemic to Paris. These actions have short-lived effects because the situation is usually reproduced after a few weeks or months in other places.

It remains to be seen if the Olympic Games will be a reality and if the image laundering will work. There is a lot of homework to do. The Games will be a headache from the start, with a parade of delegations never seen before, aboard barges, along six kilometers along the Seine, and with 600,000 people in the public to watch. Getting rid of the homeless for a while is a minor, cosmetic intervention, in the face of the colossal global challenge of the hosts.