Sunday 12th September 2021
“A French Woman”
Anne Hidalgo wants to become president
She comes from a humble background, has two passports and wants to become the first female president of France: As Mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo is best known for her deep green transport policy. She doesn’t just make friends with it.
“A French Woman” is the name of the book with which Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo poses as the possible next President of France. In fact, the title is only half the story, because Hidalgo is not only French, but also Spanish. If she wins the election, she will not only be the first woman to head the state, but also the first female president of France with dual citizenship.
After months of speculation, Hidalgo has now officially announced her presidential candidacy. However, it currently doesn’t look like the 62-year-old has a chance. In surveys, it still has single-digit approval ratings. But she calmly points out that the polls had previously declared her the loser in the local elections in March. However, Hidalgo still has to face an internal area code of the socialists, a party from which it had moved so far that it even renounced the party logo in the most recent election campaign.
In Paris she has been deeply green politics since the beginning of her term in office. She also wants to put environmental protection at the center of her election campaign. “We have to create ecological change,” she said. If she could get the Greens behind, she might have a chance. But they have just enough candidates themselves to compete against each other in a primary. Even in the shadow of her predecessor Bertrand Delanoë, Hidalgo had campaigned for the banks of the Seine to be closed to car traffic. Once in office, she continued to pursue this and also massively expanded the cycle paths.
“Know-it-all and resistant to advice”
The pandemic has literally given wings to their plans: All of a sudden, the east-west axis Rue de Rivoli was converted into an extra-wide cycle path with up to five car lanes. Numerous parking spaces have been turned into street cafes, now the speed limit is 30 almost everywhere. This policy has given Hidalgo the reputation of exclusively taking care of the interests of Parisians. “She doesn’t care about the people from the suburbs at all,” says François Delétraz, author of a diatribe against Hidalgo. Craftsmen no longer come to their customers and air pollution has only shifted to other places, he explains. Employees sometimes complained that Hidalgo was know-it-all and resistant to advice. “She begins meetings by saying, ‘I have decided’ instead of allowing discussion,” says Delétraz. At the end of last year, the city was also in debt with a good seven billion euros, according to “Le Monde”.
In the past few months, Hidalgo has been out and about a lot in the country to dispel allegations that she is not looking outside the Parisian box. She also received unofficial campaign help from her son Arthur, who swam down the entire Seine in a media-effective manner to draw attention to the threat to it. Hidalgo had announced that it would be possible to bathe in the river again until the Olympic Games in Paris in 2024.
Daughter of Spanish immigrants
The Paris City Hall had already served as a stepping stone into the Elysée Palace for one of its predecessors, the conservative Jacques Chirac, who made it the third attempt in 1995. However, Chirac was well rooted in the countryside in the Corrèze department. Hidalgo, on the other hand, worked her way up as the daughter of Spanish immigrants. She came to Lyon with her family when she was two years old, and grew up there in modest circumstances. Her parents wanted to turn their backs on dictator Francisco Franco’s Spain.
During Hidalgo’s tenure as mayor of Paris, the attacks fell on the editorial staff of “Charlie Hebdo”, on the Bataclan concert hall and the street cafes. But there was also the Paris Climate Conference, at which she and mayors of other metropolises committed to increased climate protection. The party leader of the socialists, Olivier Faure, trusts Hidalgo a lot, despite her distance from the party. “They certainly don’t roll out a red carpet for us, but a lot can still happen,” he said.
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