Vaccination debates and Covid-19 restrictions have sown divisions both on and off the presidential campaign trail in France, which ranks among the most vaccine-sceptic nations in the world. FRANCE 24 takes a look at what the candidates have said regarding the measures to contain Covid-19.
After a halting start, vaccine-sceptic France's Covid-19 inoculation campaign caught up and even surpassed those of many of its neighbours, at least in part due to the nudge provided by the introduction in July of the country's health pass, which was required for access to restaurants, some transport and cultural venues. The health pass, which was also available to people who could show a recent negative Covid-19 test, evolved into a vaccine pass on January 24 that required actual proof of vaccination and/or infection.
Some 80 percent of the French population is at least partially vaccinated – or 85 percent of those eligible – although those lining up for their first doses have slowed to fewer than 10,000 people a day. About 2,000 of those daily first-time doses are going to children from ages 5 to 11, nearly two months into a paediatric vaccination campaign that can only be described as a flop. With little more than 3 percent of primary-age schoolchildren vaccinated, according health authority Santé Publique France, France is well out of step with its far more enthusiastic EU neighbours.
Starting on Tuesday, the vaccine passes of the 4 million French adults who have not received a booster four months after their second dose became invalid, barring proof of infection: In France, two doses and one infection – or one dose and two infections – are considered equal to three doses of vaccine.
Nearly as soon as the vaccine pass entered into force in January, the government began debating when it would no longer be needed. Health Minister Olivier Véran has said the requirement could be lifted by July; government spokesman Gabriel Attal guessed as early as late-March – in plenty of time, it so happens, for the first round of the presidential election on April 10.
A word on the incumbent
With Emmanuel Macron at the helm, France was ostentatiously cautious in launching its Covid-19 vaccine campaign in December 2020 and similarly unhurried to get the drive to vaccinate young children rolling a year later. But on vaccine matters, Macron is nevertheless seen as a firm hand. He has come to be known for pointedly urging adults to get inoculated with the threat of depriving them of such French diversions as wining and dining. In a primetime televised address last July, Macron announced that visiting cinemas, restaurants and museums would all soon be contingent on showing a health pass, sending vaccinations (and Covid-19 test bookings) skyrocketing.
As Omicron surged in December, he doubled down, turning the health pass into a vaccine pass, further tightening the screws. He sparked outrage in January when he explained his thinking in the crudest terms. "The unvaccinated – I really want to piss them off. And so we're going to do so, until the end. That's the strategy," he crowed during a Town Hall interview with the daily Le Parisien.
Still, Macron has ruled out formally mandating the Covid-19 vaccine. The centrist incumbent has yet to declare his bid for re-election officially, but there is little doubt Macron will run again.
So where do the other main presidential challengers stand on vaccination issues?
On vaccine mandates
No top French presidential candidate has come out against the Covid-19 vaccine outright. Even those campaigning far to the right – Éric Zemmour, Marine Le Pen and Nicolas Dupont-Aignan – have encouraged the elderly and the vulnerable to get vaccinated, all the while walking a fine line to keep both pro- and anti-vax segments of their electorates onside.
Each of the three right-wingers are opposed to vaccine mandates. Rassemblement national (National Rally) candidate Le Pen has called the policy of suspending healthcare professionals without pay for refusing innoculations a "scandal" and "brutal" for the caregivers as well as "absolute stupidity" when patients need their care. But of the three, only Dupont-Aignan has not been vaccinated himself.
Ever the contrarian, Zemmour has even written that it "isn't right that France has been absent from the race for vaccines and treatments against Covid-19 when we are the country of [vaccine pioneer Louis] Pasteur", blaming Macron at least in part.
Meanwhile, mainstream conservative candidate Valérie Pécresse opposes a universal Covid-19 vaccine mandate. But she did come out clearly in favour of Macron's vaccine pass, before hedging with a criticism on its belated implementation to appease opponents within her Les Républicains party.
Two leftist candidates – the Socialist Party's Anne Hidalgo and the independent People's Primary winner Christiane Taubira – are in the minority for supporting a nationwide vaccine mandate. Hidalgo's campaign slammed the "hypocrisy" of the government's vaccine pass, which she called a de facto universal mandate that her Socialist Party says simply puts the onus for enforcement onto others.
Taubira similarly suggested that a "frank" nationwide requirement, one properly explained to the public, is preferable to Macron's vaccine pass. "The vaccine pass doesn't bother me, what bothers me is leaving it to citizens, like restaurant and shop owners, to perform identity checks on their fellow citizens," Taubira, who served as justice minister under former Socialist president François Hollande, told France Inter radio last month.
But for Taubira, the scrappy latecomer to this race who hails from French Guiana, her recent stance is something of an about-face. In September, she was roundly criticised for refusing to recommend the jab to residents of that heavily under-vaccinated French overseas territory.
Elsewhere on the left, after initial murmurings in favour of mandatory vaccination for adults, Greens candidate Yannick Jadot has since decided that it is "better to convince than to constrain".
Far-left candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon, a lower-house lawmaker, has said the same about mandatory vaccination. He has slammed the "vaccine pass" at the pulpit of the National Assembly as "100 percent ineffective" since it could not guard against Omicron infections.
French Communist Party candidate Fabien Roussel has said he would revoke the vaccine pass requirement as president. He is campaigning instead for providing doctors with lists of their unvaccinated patients so they can "go door-to-door" persuading them, telling France Info that he "prefers a benevolent society to a coercive one".
Vaccinating children
Far-right candidates have been the most vocal about France's paediatric vaccination campaign, with each stridently against it. Zemmour has said he is downright "hostile" to the idea and that vaccinating children against Covid-19 "beggars belief".
Le Pen has said she is opposed because "the risk-benefit for children is nil", given that children have been less affected by the virus. "They have almost no chance of being victims of a serious form, so vaccinating them is, in my opinion, a form of abuse," she told France Inter radio last month, although has said she makes an exception for children already suffering from chronic illnesses.
Dupont-Aignan, meanwhile, similarly accused the government of endangering kids with the vaccine when, he contends, the risks outweigh the benefits. He called the policy "horrifying" speaking on the floor of the lower-house National Assembly in January.
Perhaps unsurprisingly in a country currently vaccinating fewer than 2,000 eligible children under 12 on an average day, most other candidates range between perfunctorily in favour and not opposed. Many (Jadot, Roussel, New Anti-Capitalist party candidate Philippe Poutou) put the emphasis on vaccinating vulnerable children in particular or lean into parents' right to make the choice their own children (Mélenchon, Jadot), even though Covid-19 vaccine mandates for primary schoolchildren are not on the table in France.
Intellectual property and the vaccines
In a rare show of unity on the left – where candidates have otherwise been conspicuously reluctant to join forces – four presidential contenders co-signed an open letter to Macron in January calling for intellectual property rights on Covid-19 vaccines to be suspended to allow their mass production in developing nations. Far-leftist Mélenchon, the Greens' Jadot, Socialist Party candidate Hidalgo and New Anti-Capitalist party candidate Poutou noted in the joint missive that only 1 percent of available Covid-19 vaccines went to poor countries over the previous year and 74 percent to the richest.
"Raising production capacity will be decisive for controlling the pandemic and countering the potential arrival of new variants," the leftist quartet wrote as Omicron raged, asking Macron to drop French opposition on the vaccine patent issue. As France began its six-month term as rotating president of the EU Council, they "formally" asked Macron to "publicly express himself in favour of 'lifting the patents'" and call on the World Health Organization to address the matter.
Communist candidate Roussel said separately in January that France should lead the way on lifting vaccine patents.
As early as June 2020, Macron had advocated for Covid-19 vaccines becoming a "global public good". But he has also held firm to the idea that intellectual property rights are essential to the type of innovation that leads to vaccines. The EU has so far stood firm in its refusal to lift patent protections.
"We don't want to call into question the intellectual property system that permits innovation and that notably allowed humanity to have a vaccine for Covid-19 very quickly," French Trade Minister Franck Riester said Monday as he hosted EU counterparts in Marseille. The minister nevertheless added: "We think that it's important that there be access to the vaccine for all and that the countries that wish to produce the vaccines themselves on their territory should be able to do so. We believe intellectual property should never be a brake in that capacity."
Les Républicains candidate Pécresse, who once served as minister for higher education and research under conservative former president Nicolas Sarkozy, has also come out in favour of preserving intellectual property rights in order to encourage research.
On the far right, Le Pen has said the focus should be on dispatching doses to developing countries instead of on lifting patents. In contrast, Dupont-Aignan, Le Pen's erstwhile right-wing ally, has come out in favour, calling it "unacceptable that large pharmaceutical firms, who have benefitted from public funds, make exorbitant profits in the middle of a pandemic".
