A mayoral race in a small French town is gaining traction on social media thanks to their names, as Hittler faces off against Zielinski for re-election.<\/p>\n
Charles Hittler, who currently serves as the mayor of Arcis-sur-Aube, 160km southeast of Paris, told the BBC he had gotten “the occasional joke” his entire life thanks to his name’s resemblance to that of late German dictator Adolf Hitler.<\/p>\n
However, it had “gone completely crazy” thanks to the name of one of his two opponents \u2013 far-right candidate Antoine Renault-Zielinski, whose name, if not his politics, was similar to that of Ukraine leader Volodymyr Zelensky.<\/p>\n
“But now it’s out of control. I’ve seen online articles saying ‘37% of the people of Arcis are Hitlerites!’ My wife is in tears,” Hittler said.<\/p>\n
“If people were talking about the town and our policies, that would be one thing. But all they’re interested in is our names.”<\/p>\n
Renault-Zielinski told French broadcaster BFMTV he was alerted to their names trending on X on Sunday. <\/p>\n
“I thought it was just a silly joke but, gradually, I realised that everyone is talking about us,” he said. <\/p>\n
While he understood the humour in the situation, Renault-Zielinski said he was neutral on the sudden internet fame.<\/p>\n
“It doesn’t make me laugh, but it doesn’t bother me either,” he said. <\/p>\n
“It would be better if people were talking about Arcis for other reasons, but at least we’re on the map.”<\/p>\n
Hittler was in the lead to be re-elected mayor.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A mayoral race in a small French town is gaining traction on social media thanks to their names,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":337271,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[42,43,40,38,41,39,1745],"class_list":["post-337270","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories","tag-uk-europe"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/337270","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=337270"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/337270\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/337271"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=337270"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=337270"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=337270"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}