PARIS: In France’s lower house of parliament, a top opposition lawmaker held up a small vial for all her colleagues to see. Its contents, she warned in a fiery speech this week, were “spreading despair” around the country.
“Must we wait for your office to be infested before you finally react?” Mathilde Panot told PM Elisabeth Borne. Borne shot back, urging Panot to observe “a bit of decency” and vowing that the government would act resolutely against the contents of the vial. In it – probably dead and undoubtedly oblivious to the fact that they are now France’s hottest topic – were some bedbugs.
After a string of viral online posts purporting to show specimens crawling across the seats of trains, cinemas and subways, photos of bedbugs are now being splashed across newspaper pages. And the insects have been discussed endlessly on TV talk shows around in recent days, fuelling nationwide anxiety, if not alarm, especially in the French capital.
While evidence that bedbugs are suddenly sweeping the country is mostly anecdotal, experts say that the pests have resurged in households in Paris, New York and other cities over the past decades because of a boom in international travel and the bugs’ growing resistance to pesticides.
The run-up to the Olympics is fertile ground for hand-wringing about a nation’s preparedness – in China, it was smog; in Brazil, it was water pollution; in Greece, it was security – and with less than a year to go before Paris hosts the Summer Games, the sudden spotlight on bedbugs has left President Macron’s opponents itching for a fight. Macron’s government has been forced to convene a flurry of top-level meetings to reassure the world that the City of Light is not turning into the City of Bites.
