Daily Times

PARIS: On a busy street in central Paris Friday, a blonde girl in the blue jersey and white shorts of the French football team blows a referee’s whistle at passing football fans.

To try and lure football fans, the Grevin wax museum has rolled out wax figures of famous players from Sweden’s Zlatan Ibrahomovic and Argentina’s Lionel Messi to Portugal’s Cristiano Ronaldo.

“I got two groups earlier. One Romanian, one Swedish,” said Morgane Vandermeersch, a 25-year-old guide at the museum.

“Numbers have been down lately because of the strikes and floods. We’re hoping for people from the Euro,” Vandermeersch explained. Across the capital, hoteliers, souvenir vendors, restaurant owners and taxi drivers are all hoping the Euro 2016 football extravaganza will lure back the tourists that have dodged the city since the November 13 terror attacks.

Liza Habib, manager of a souvenir stand in the 9th district of Paris said she had sold four big flags on Friday morning, two French and one each from Sweden and Germany. But there were few customers for her football-themed mugs, magnets and other merchandise. “I’m a little worried,” she said.

Weeks of violent protests over labour reforms, severe floods and, more recently, the transport and rubbish collection strikes have cast a pall over the run-up to the football fest.

“The image that is being given is not the one we wanted,” chief organiser Jacques Lambert admitted just hours before the opening match between France and Romania at the capital’s Stade de France For visitors, one of the most visible aspects of the turmoil is the mounds of uncollected rubbish dotting the pavements, days after strikers began blockading incineration plants.

“Welcome to France,” the biting headline on the cover of Le Parisien newspaper read Thursday, lamenting the “mess.”

Commenting on the “strong smell”, Sarah, 30, from England, remarked somewhat euphemistically: “It isn’t ideal for the games.”

More worrisome for some French supporters is the lack of a palpable sense of excitement hours before kick-off.

“There’s no football atmosphere yet,” Emilie Riquier, a 35-year-old fan who has travelled from the southern city of Nice for the opening game complained.

Riquier and her husband flew to Paris with Air France but with a quarter of the airline’s pilots set to strike from Saturday, “we don’t know how we’ll get home”, she said. Like the Riquiers, Julia Settgast, a German student on a language course in Paris, also remarked on the dearth of football fever.

“I have the feeling the French are not very interested in the European championship. If it’s because they are afraid of terrorism I can understand but it’s very sad.”

Uncertainty also hung over the trains needed to ferry fans to stadiums and between host cities.

Hardline unions behind a 10-day-old stoppage promised Friday evening not to hamper access to the opening game but gave no guarantees for the rest of the tournament. Yet it is the terror threat that has niggled most for some fans, with the jihadist massacre of 130 people at the Stade de France and Paris nightspots in November still uppermost in many minds.

Fraying French flags flown by mourners remained dotted here and there on balconies throughout the city.

Downing pints at a huge fan zone at the foot of the Eiffel Tower, where the opening concert passed off without incident Thursday, 20-year-old Ruairi Scott from Belfast said: “There is a lot of security here, but it’s ok. I was a little worried before we came here, but not anymore. I feel safe.”

Alex Kojakaro, a Romanian supporter en route to the Stade de France in a hat coloured in his country’s blue, yellow and red admitted he was “a little worried” about terrorism — a spectre driven home by the sight of patrolling soldiers with submachine guns.

But fellow countryman Daniel Suciu, 27, shrugged off the threat from Islamist radicals. “We live in a dangerous world,” Suciu said, “but to support Romania is just more important than everything.”