The French capital has been turned into a giant Olympic park this weekend in an extravagant final push to win the 2024 Olympics bid. While not all Parisians are in favour of the Games, dissenting voices are few and far between, reports FRANCE 24.
Budapest decided to pull out of its bid for the Olympic Games because of a massive grassroots opposition movement to the games called “NOlimpia", which claimed the Games would push Hungary into huge financial debt. Boston ended its Olympic candidacy for similar reasons.
But opposition to the Games in Paris doesn’t seem to be deterring Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo, who is spearheading the city’s glitzy campaign to win the Games (thus beating the other candidate, Los Angeles). Of the 20 arrondissements (districts) that make up Paris—each of which has its own local government-- only one mayor, Jacques Boutault, refused to join the collective campaign for the bid back in March 2015. In recent months, Danielle Simonnet, a city councillor from Paris’s 20th arrondissement who belongs to Jean-Luc Mélenchon's far-left France Insoumise party, has been pushing for a referendum on the question to let Parisians decide.
This weekend, Hidalgo pulled out all the stops in a two-day extravaganza for World Olympic Day to show the world what Paris can do—Divers plunged into the Seine and sprinters raced on a floating track. Yet the spectacle hasn’t convinced Frédéric Viale, a teacher and one of the organisers of a collective called “NO to the 2024 Paris Olympics” (NON aux JO 2024 à Paris), which has about 50 members.
“Mobilisation of the opposition is, admittedly, weak but we aren’t inaudible,” Viale told FRANCE 24. “We garnered 20,000 signatures on a petition calling for a referendum on this question… and we didn’t even have any media coverage!”
The opposition's main complaint is the money the city would have to spend on organising the games. The city has drafted a provisional budget of 6.6 billion euros, a quarter of which would be public money. But Viale fears it would be much more.
“Budget overruns are inevitable—you just have to look at the numbers from all of the previous Olympics,” Viale said.
Indeed, a report published in June 2016 showed that Brazil’s Olympic Games ran 51% over budget—an overspend of about $1.6 billion.
“And all of that for 15 days of festivities,” Viale says. “We have nothing against sports or fun but we don’t want to sacrifice future generations by indebting ourselves for several decades.”
City councillor Simonnet points out that this money will not necessarily be used in ways that address residents' needs, citing an ongoing project to improve public transport to disenfranchised Parisian suburbs.