FRENCH POLITICS UPDATE
This again is absolutely hilarious omgg. So, the mayor of the city Saint-Ouen which is a city very close to Paris is currently having a war against Master Poulet which is a fastfood restaurant chain who's been spreading across the parisian region for a few years.
Some info here : Paris isn't a big capital compared to other cities around the world, but it has a large suburb area made out of dozens of other cities. There are residential suburbs filled with rich and privilegied families, and sensitive urban zones with a lot of immigrants and poor people who can't afford living within Paris itself. Saint-Ouen was known as part of the second type, but a few politicians have been working on changing the city into something more appealing for the upper middle class, hence started the gentrification : new chic neighborhood, entirely renovated roads and buildings, etc. But then, the very popular fastfood chain Master Poulet ("poulet" means chicken) opened a restaurant right into that area, attracting young low-class people and creating more traffic in the street. Master Poulet is take-away only so people stand in line in front of the restaurant to order their food, then either go home or find a place around to eat it.
The problem is : the mayor of Saint-Ouen HATES it. He WANTS the gentrified neighborhood to stay as such, and to preserves its reputation he tried to force the restaurant to close but he legally cannot do that, so he found other ways to fight :
- He built concrete walls around the restaurant to render it completely inaccessible. He wasn't allowed to do that. Legal justice forced him to break the walls, so he did.
- He installed huge flowerpots (by huge I mean 2 meters high) in front of the restaurant to block the access AND purposely put a shit flagrance (i mean, litteral shit. It smelled like poo and vomit.) in the flowers to discourage people to buy their food there
- He posted a few tiktoks and tweets criticizing the restaurant, calling it unhealthy food (it's literally rice and chicken. I swear to god. It is rice, pasta, potateos, and roasted chicken. Not even deep fried chicken. It has sausages. You have a whole meal -with drink!!- for less than 8€), saying it doesn't respect food safety rules (it does), that he recieved several complaints from the residents about bad odors (THAT HE COVERED WITH POOP SMELL) and noises (HE INSTALLED LITERAL WALLS IN THE MIDDLE OF THE DAY)
So yeah it's very fucking stupid, everyone is making fun of him, and now BFMTV which is France's first tv news channel, so something supposed to be extremely serious (but eh, it's owned by a right-wing billionaire so it's not very neytral), invited the Mayor to talk about politic but it turned out it was a fucking trap. They trolled him. They bought Master Poulet food, proposed it to him -which he refused obviously- and started eating in front lf him while he was ranting about why he fights against this restaurant. I put the video here, and you don't need to understand french to see how ridiculous it is.
THIS IS LIKE CNN. THIS ISN'T THE DAILY SHOW OR JIMMY FALLON. THIS IS AN OFFICIAL, NATIONAL AND INTERNATIONAL NEWS CHANNEL. THEY PLANNED IT AND DID IT ON PURPOSE TO MAKE FUN OF HIM AND THEY ABSOLUTELY ENJOYED EVERY SECOND OF IT. IT'S SO STUPID AND FUNNY BUT ALSO WHO ALLOWED THAT ?????
And to blow your mind even more : That guy, named Karim Bouamrane, the Mayor of Saint-Ouen, was one of the people in line to take the Prime Minister role during that crazy political hellhole period (1. Long story 2. Short story.) And now he's fighting against a fucking chicken restaurant.
So, if you're wondering what's happening in France lately... Yeah, we're here now.