Saturday was local elections day in France. I went to the communal building were the election was organized. I expected a deserted place filled with fear and hysteria. To my surprise the carpark was packed with hundreds of cars. Same inside the building with 100's of voters, families, kids. Nobody I saw was wearing a mask.
People were chitchatting (at a normal distance, not the 3meters safety distance) quite joyfully.
In the end, participation rate was 45% (it was 64% in 2014). In France there are 44 millions voters, it means that, compared to 2014, 8 million of them were frightened enough by the "epidemics" to not go voting. But it also means that 20 million of them were unaffected enough by the on-going hysteria to go vote.
Today I went grocery shopping, I was expecting queues, empty shelves, full biohazard suits, it happened to be a great shopping experience
View attachment 34319
No queue at the cash registers
No queue whatsoever, no jam, pretty empty parking lot.
View attachment 34317
The supermarket is open, the parking lot is quite empty
A few customers, none of them wearing gloves or masks ( most employees do wear masks). The shelves were 80% full, I found everything we needed: sourkrout, rice, vegetal milk, eggs. A few shelves were empty: some caned food, all the toilet paper, all the milk were gone.
View attachment 34318
Customers not wearing masks and full shelves
The only disappointment was that I didn't get a fine. In France, people are only allowed to leave their house for essential activities (doctor appointment, pharmacy trip, grocery shopping...) even for these activities they need a written certificate, where they basically write down their name, address and purpose of their trip.
I didn't fill this form and since the government promised 100,000 policemen in the street to enforce totalitarian and meaningless rules I was pretty sure to get fined, which would have been a great memory of the 2020 coronavirus hysteria.
I drove about 30 km and saw only one police car that conducting no control/fining whatsoever. The extensive police control announced by the authorities sounds like a bluff to me.
Police forces are under-equipped, understaffed, demotivated, exhausted by 70 weeks of Yellow Vest protests and overburdened. A few months ago, they were not even able to protect the presidential palace against the Yellow Vests.
Actually the 3 policemen in the above mentioned police car were starring at sheep:
View attachment 34320
It seems that the local shepherd took the opportunity of the low activity generated by the thoroughly orchestrated hysteria to walk his sheep in the parking lot.