GREETINGS. This is Nick Vinocur, writing Playbook from Italy’s Latina region, where the beach concessions are doing brisk business under the blazing sun, despite Europe’s best efforts to rein in the lettino e ombrellone cartels. (For the record, we are a spiaggia libera family this year.) For the latest on Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s existential effort to maintain the Italian quirk that allows bar and club owners exclusive rights to portions of the shoreline, read this report by my colleague Giovanna Faggionato.
FRANCE UNITED … FOR ONCE Share on Twitter Share on Facebook Share on Linkedin Share on Handclap1
POLITICS ON HOLD AS MARCHAND-MANIA GRIPS FRANCE: The reports are in and they’re unanimous. The Paris Olympics have accomplished the incredible feat of getting the French to stop grumbling, ignore politics and unite in stunned admiration of Léon Marchand, the 22-year-old swimmer who has swept up four gold medals and a bronze.
Sound on: It’s worth watching the crowds erupt in raucous chinese overseas british database renditions of “La Marseillaise” — tweaked to replace the word marchons (let’s walk) with Marchand … get it? — and whole streets cheering the young Toulousian’s victories. “The whole country is united in the stunned and incredulous contemplation of this champion who came from nowhere,” wrote the Midi Libre, a regional daily based in southern France.
Don’t take it from me. One American visiting Paris for the Olympics wrote in to Playbook to report they’d attempted to switch the TV at a sports bar to a soccer game, causing the locals to “freak out.” “They only want to watch swimming,” the visitor said. “They really love Léon Marchand.”
Ya think? The joy over Marchand and fervor over the Olympics in general have single-handedly flipped the national mood after months of political angst and griping about preparations for the Games. While France may be no closer to having a prime minister, it’s got its mojo back thanks to Olympic exuberance eclipsing politics as a topic of conversation — for now.
Positive patriotism: Benjamin Haddad, a lawmaker in Macron’s centrist Ensemble party, whose constituency is in Paris’ tony 16th district, tells Playbook “this is a great moment of positive patriotism. We see the Parisians who left the city [to escape the Olympics] actually coming back to soak up the ambiance.” A local who stayed in the capital concurs, saying the whole place feels like a giant theme park, kitted out with BMX tracks, skateparks, basketball courts and so on — shades of the 1889 Paris Expo, for which the Eiffel Tower was constructed.