WITH an election looming in three months's time, French President, Emmanuel Macron, is taking a novel approach, saying he deliberately wants to alienate roughly five million voters.
In an interview with Le Parisien, Macron outlined his strategy to boost the nation's COVID-19 vaccination rate, by irritating the unvaccinated.
"I really want to piss them off," he said.
"And so we will continue to do so, to the bitter end.
"That's the strategy... I am not going to put them in prison, I am not going to forcibly vaccinate them.
"Therefore you have to say to them: from 15 Jan you can no longer go to a restaurant, you can no longer go for a drink, you can no longer go for a coffee, you can no longer go to the theatre, you can no longer go to the cinema."
While Presidential rival, Marine Le Pen, criticised the comments saying Macron was "unworthy of his office" and wanted "to make the unvaccinated second-class citizens", his plan has struck a chord with voters, who described it as "very clever".
"The antivaxxers are a minority who piss off the majority," one voter said in a post on Twitter.
"The majority of vaccinated [people] hate the antivax [movement], he expresses out loud what the majority thinks softly."
With Australia facing an election it will be interesting to see if the Federal Government considers a similar tactic.
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