Xavier Bertrand will be able to breathe better from this Thursday. – Sarah ALCALAY / SIPA
Xavier Bertrand, president (ex-LR) of Hauts-de-France candidate for his re-election, considered Thursday that the anticipated announcement of the end of the wearing of the mask outside by the government was “a gift” a few days before the first round of regional elections. “I say thank you for the first round of regional elections. I’m not fooled (…). I think the policy was not far away ”, and“ the question we ask ourselves is: what gift do we have next week? Because there is the second round of regional elections, so there is bound to be good news coming, ”he said on Franceinfo.
“But in the meantime, the end of the mask, so much the better”, he nevertheless admitted, “it feels good, we want to breathe, I want to breathe, the French want to breathe”. As for the early end of the curfew, he noted that he was anyway “dead since last week” because of the “double standards” of the Government which had “granted an exemption for those who were in Roland. -Garros while the young people were evacuated from the Invalides ”. “Decidedly, we should have organized the elections earlier, the Government would have thought of putting an end to the mask before …”, quipped in a tweet the candidate LR in Bourgogne-Franche-Comté and mayor of Chalon-sur-Saône (Saône-et-Loire) Gilles Platret.
The candidates recall the importance of barrier gestures
Also questioned on a possible link between the announcement and the Sunday ballot, Valérie Pécresse (ex-LR, Libres!), Candidate for re-election at the head of the Ile-de-France region, estimated that “the French are much smarter than that: they vote for their regional president and it is not a decision of this type that will make them change their vote, ”she said on Europe 1. She welcomed the end of the two measures , a “common sense” and “pragmatic” decision, while calling for people to continue to respect barrier gestures. On the left, the head of the PS list in Ile-de-France Audrey Pulvar also congratulated herself, recalling in a tweet that the end of wearing a mask is “not everywhere, and with caution!” “
Underlining a faster than expected improvement in the health situation in the face of Covid-19, the Government announced on Wednesday, ten days before the scheduled date of June 30, the end of the obligation to wear a mask outside on Thursday and the lifting of the curfew from Sunday.