In France, Anti-Vax Fury and Politics Make Public Service Risky for Local Officials

In Sainte-Anastasie-sur-Issole, a village of about 2,000 people tucked into the hills of Provence, residents are voting this weekend and next on something unusual: which presidential candidate their mayor should endorse. The ballot box will produce one name, chosen from around 45 would-be candidates, including President Emmanuel Macron, who has not yet said he is running again but whom Mayor Olivier Hoffmann assumes will.

Under French rules, the decision would normally be Hoffmann's alone. Candidates need 500 endorsements from elected officials to reach the April ballot, which turns small-town mayors into sought-after figures at election time. Roughly 42,000 officials can sponsor a candidate. Endorsing does not mean agreeing with a candidate's politics, and some sponsors simply want a broad choice on the ballot. But endorsements are public, and that carries risk.

Hoffmann, who describes himself as staunchly apolitical and keeps his own views private, wants to avoid being cast as a partisan. He worries about neighbors saying, in his words, that he endorsed someone so he must support them, and sorting him by color. He has pledged to sponsor whoever wins the village vote, even if that candidate is far from his own leanings. In the 2017 presidential run-off that Macron won, the village voted by a large majority for the loser, far-right leader Marine Le Pen, who is running again. "I know lots and lots of people in the village, many are my friends, I don't want to create tensions," Hoffmann said by phone. "So no politics."

His caution comes amid a sharp rise in hostility toward French officials, much of it now tied to anger over COVID-19 policy. The Interior Ministry recorded a 47% year-on-year increase in violence against elected officials over the first 11 months of 2021. In that period, 162 lawmakers and 605 mayors or deputy mayors reported being attacked. National Assembly president Richard Ferrand says more than 540 of the 577 lawmakers have reported threats, or verbal or physical attacks. Lawmakers say death threats have become routine. In November, Ludovic Mendes received an email titled "decapitation" that read: "That's how we dealt with tyrants during the French Revolution."

Some incidents have been physical. This month, during protests against the vaccine pass that bars unvaccinated people from cafés and other venues, about 30 angry demonstrators besieged the office of lawmaker Romain Grau, shoving him and shouting. One man yelled "Death! We'll get you all!!" and swung a slap at Grau's head. Grau later told broadcaster TF1 he feared it would end "in a blood bath and a lynching."

In December, apparent arson attacks hit a lawmaker and a mayor, both aligned with Macron. Lawmaker Pascal Bois's garage burned, and the words "Vote no" and "It's going to blow!" were spray-painted outside, which he read as intimidation ahead of parliament's passage of the vaccine pass. Bernard Denis, mayor of the Normandy village of Saint-Côme-du-Mont, was woken by a loud boom one night to find his cars aflame and "The mayor supports Macron" painted on a wall, along with a misspelled "Zemour president," an apparent nod to far-right candidate Eric Zemmour, who has repeated hate-speech convictions.

The violence has not reached the scale of the January 2021 storming of the U.S. Capitol, and French lawmakers have not been killed as a British MP was in a fatal stabbing in October. Ferrand said France "isn't bathed in fire and blood," calling the acts the work of "brutal minorities," but added that things have "ratcheted up a notch, expressing a rage that is new." Anti-vaccine sentiment is also mixing with leftover anger from the "yellow vest" movement, whose often violent protests against Macron predated the pandemic; some recent demonstrators have worn the vests again.

What to watch is whether intimidation makes officials reluctant to put their names behind candidates before the April vote. In Sainte-Anastasie, Hoffmann's answer is to hand the choice to the village he says he wants to give "everything I have."