The president of the Les Républicains party Éric Ciotti suggested on Saturday that they should give up organizing the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympic Games on the Seine, because security there might not be guaranteed.
“The attack on the Eiffel Tower showed our immense fragilities in terms of security. In this context, the scenario of the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games on the Seine seems very risky to me as it stands,” declared the boss of LR in an interview with Le Parisien posted online on Saturday evening.
“We have to think of a plan B, for example at the Stade de France, in a closed and secure place. I ask the government to have no taboos when it comes to the security of the French,” he added.
The question of security during this opening ceremony was revived by the attack committed on December 2 near the Eiffel Tower by a radicalized Islamist who killed a German-Filipino tourist and injured two other people. The organizers of the Games aim to organize a grandiose opening ceremony on July 26 in Paris, during which delegations of athletes will descend the Seine aboard barges in front of hundreds of thousands of spectators. The show must be regulated by the director Thomas Jolly.
As early as December 4, Sports Minister Amélie Oudéa-Castéra assured that the relocation of this ceremony was not the government’s working hypothesis. “We don’t have a plan B, we have a plan A in which there are several plans Bs,” she said, emphasizing in particular the possibility of adjusting the number of spectators who will be admitted to attend.
