Emmanuel Macron (and all of Paris) dans la merde

Welcome to Declassified, a weekly humor column.

Inside a planning meeting for the Paris Olympics, sometime in late 2017…

Marketing: “Hey guys, I’ve got this great idea! Why don’t we have the opening ceremony for the Olympics along the river Seine?”

Security: “You’re joking, right? It’ll be a terrorist’s dream. Are we making ‘being picked off by a sniper’ an Olympic event?”

Marketing: “Calm down, it’ll be fine. We could even have people swimming in the river.”

Environmental health (spits out coffee): “In the Seine? You do know that it’s literally full of shit? Are we making ‘getting dysentery’ an Olympic event?”

Fast-forward to today and the marketing folks clearly won. Earlier this year, President Emmanuel Macron promised to one day take a swim in the Seine, as he officially inaugurated the 2024 Olympic Village and praised the legacy that the Games will leave.

“You bet I will,” Macron told reporters when asked if he would swim in the river, which the city has promised to make clean enough for swimming by 2025. Tellingly, he did not give a date for his swim (perhaps he’ll announce that it’s actually the holder of the French presidency who needs to swim in effluent rather than it being specifically him, and that the date for the river plunge is one day after Marine Le Pen takes over in 2027).

Then Anne Hidalgo, the mayor of Paris, went one better (or perhaps worse) — saying she would dive into the Seine on June 23. The chief of police and other top city officials have been invited to join her. Lucky them.

Both Hidalgo and Macron seem to be conjuring up the spirit of Jacques Chirac, who announced in 1988 that he would bathe in the Seine. Spoiler alert: He did not.

The good people of Paris appear to be fighting back against these bathing plans by, er, pledging to use the Seine as a toilet, specifically on the same day that Hidalgo plans to take a dip.

There’s been an uptick in use of the social media hashtag #JechiedanslaSeine, amongst mocked-up images of Macron covered in crap and of mass gatherings of people on the banks of the river holding aloft toilet rolls. There’s a website with the tagline “Because after putting us in shit it’s up to them to bathe in our shit.” There’s even a poster made in the style of a festival flyer with the names of Seine swimmers.

The political class should just embrace the public discomfort and make waterpolo but with a turd an Olympic event. A guaranteed gold medal for France!

CAPTION COMPETITION

“Wait until he sits down! The chair is covered in wet paint!”

Can you do better? Email pdallison@politico.eu or on Twitter/X @pdallisonesque

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Paul Dallison is POLITICO’s deputy EU editor.