To analyse. It’s a ” turn of rigor » with the Parisian sauce that Anne Hidalgo suddenly took on Monday, November 7, when she decided to increase the property tax. She resigned herself to it, against all odds, after several weeks of procrastination and resistance to her environmentalist allies who urged her to do so. She ended up deciding after looking, in every corner, if it was possible to make 250 million euros in savings to balance her budget in the face of inflation, the energy crisis and the drop in revenue linked to the health crisis caused by the coronavirus. In vain. An increase recorded in rupture with his electoral promise, during the municipal campaign of 2020, to sanctify local taxes. An increase that Parisian owners swallow in a non-homeopathic monodose since the tax jumps by 52%, from 13.5% to 20.5%. Even if the rate imposed by the capital remains below the national average.
The mayor of Paris knew the political disadvantage of such a decision. She ignites a little more a municipal opposition already white-hot since her return after her misadventures in the presidential election (1.75% of the votes in the first round). The Republicans (LR) see it as new irrefutable proof that the finances of the City of Paris are in the bright red.
Rachida Dati has been agitating frantically for months the inevitability of budgetary supervision. As for the presidential majority, stung by the accusations of Anne Hidalgo, who blames the tense situation on Emmanuel Macron and the financial disengagement of the State in favor of local communities, it continues to counter-attack. Gabriel Attal, minister in charge of public accounts and putative candidate for mayor of Paris in 2026, compared Anne Hidalgo’s budgetary strategy to a Ponzi pyramid, a criminal cavalry scheme. The City of Paris could file a complaint for defamation.
No third term
By increasing the property tax so sharply, did the Parisian city councilor commit a political fault, four years before the next municipal elections, by placing, despite herself, the debate on the capital’s finances at the heart, already inflamed, of the next campaign, in the same way as cleanliness, safety or traffic? Anne Hidalgo has announced that she will not run for a third term, but it is not certain that she will serve her first deputy and quasi-designated heir, Emmanuel Grégoire. In other words, would she have acted the same if she had imagined herself as a new candidate? We’ll never know. On the other hand, Emmanuel Grégoire hinted that he would have done the same when, several weeks ago, he tried to convince the mayor that, this time, political will could do nothing about it and that it was necessary to resolve to announce an unpopular measure.
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