After a Macron five-year term, France is slow to become “a sporting nation”


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Driven by obtaining the 2024 Olympics, the executive should have made sport a social issue. But the measures concerning the sector have been too timid, while the sector must fight to regain its standards before the health crisis.

It was with a proposal for a sports law distorted from its initial content, overshadowed by the controversy around the ban on the wearing of any ostentatious religious sign in competitions, but validated in the last months of the five-year term, that the sports mandate of Emmanuel Macron. Five years that should make “of France a sporting nation”, according to the consecrated expression of the president-candidate in 2017.

In many ways, sport in the macronie will have looked like a series of missed opportunities. Obtaining the Paris Games at the dawn of the quinquennium corresponded to an ideal timing. Not that the Olympics are going to upset society from top to bottom, but the executive should have taken advantage of the windfall, used the event as a pretext to place sporting activity at the heart of the debates, to launch immediately a battery of measures, with a horizon of 2024.

Trompe-l’œil bailouts

Instead, the ministry saw its appropriations cut over the first three years. Minus 80 million euros, assure the specialists of the question in the National Assembly. Funny way to “supporting and promoting high-level athletes” as the President intended. “The family of French sport is in danger”, write in November 2018, quite short…



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