Anne Hidalgo, the mayor managing paradoxes of Olympic proportions

Abroad, Anne Hidalgo is often seen as an environmental pioneer, someone who, as mayor of Paris, has built hundreds of kilometers of bike lanes and is inventing the metropolis of the future. In France, and in its capital — shimmering and always splendid to outsiders — it is something different. There is a part of the electorate and the political spectrum that simply does not buy it. In some cases the rejection is visceral. They accuse her of poor management and consider that the city has become dirtier, uglier, and more inhospitable on her watch.

After the catastrophic result in the 2022 French presidential elections, in which she was a socialist candidate and received 1.75% of the votes, many thought that Hidalgo’s career was coming to an end. They did not know her. She hung in. Now she faces the decisive moment since, 10 years ago, she arrived at the Hôtel de Ville, the monumental Parisian City Hall. The culmination of a story that began shortly after settling into the office on the southwest corner, the largest official office in France, from which Charles de Gaulle greeted Parisians in August 1944, after the liberation of Paris.

Between July 26 and August 11, the 2024 Olympic Games will be the glittering prize in the career of this daughter of Spanish immigrants who arrived in France when she was two years old. Maybe her revenge. Despite the setbacks and criticism, despite the general pessimism in Paris and France, despite the little enthusiasm that, for now, is noticeable on the street, if everything goes well she could look like the Olympic mayor, the face (along with that of President Emmanuel Macron) of a city and a country during the Olympic summer.

“We are prepared,” the mayor said in June, just over a year before the inauguration. Half a year later, she explains that there are still tasks pending. Metro transportation must be improved, which is not the responsibility of the city, and she is concerned about the nearly 3,000 homeless people in the capital and the lack of shelters for them. In this case, too, she points to the state. For her, the Olympic Games are a tool to accelerate her ecological plans and promote her social agenda. She explained it this week: “It is an extraordinary opportunity for Paris.”

When Hidalgo was elected mayor in 2014, she broke down barriers. She was the first woman to hold the office of Mayor of Paris and the first born abroad. Her mother was a seamstress. Her father was the son of someone who was persecuted by Franco’s regime. “Hidalgo’s entire childhood was surrounded by this family legend of never forgetting the Civil War and Francoism,” said her biographer, journalist Serge Raffy, during the failed presidential campaign. Years later, already at the Hôtel de Ville, she was key to recognizing the role of the Spanish republicans in the liberation of Paris.

“Daughter of an immigrant laborer, with each passing day I saw myself more as a daughter of France, because my school gave a sense of belonging to all the children who were in my situation,” the mayor wrote in the book Une femme française (available in French and Spanish). Ideologically, she is a classic social democrat — in a country in which the Socialist Party seems moribund and is led by a current that is not hers — and she stands in contrast to both Macron’s liquid centrism and the populist, Eurosceptic left, which refused to classify Hamas as a terrorist group after the attack against Israel on October 7.

It was the Islamist attacks in Paris in 2015, when she had been in office for just a year, that led her to fight for a candidacy that until then was not clear to her. France was a fractured country. The Olympic Games could be a unique moment, the time that strength returned to the city and the country. A moment of “joy and brotherhood” in a world of wars and populism.

And it is true that, for two weeks, the city will be the best stage imaginable: the opening ceremony on the Seine, the backdrop of the Eiffel Tower and scenic Paris; Notre Dame which, after the 2019 fire, will reopen at the end of the year. “When the lights go out and the party starts,” one of the mayor’s collaborators dreams aloud, “it will be something incredible.”

But the Games are always much more than the Games. And they can also be less. The political quarrels, the jealousy, the fighting over who stands where in the photo. Relations between Macron and Hidalgo are difficult. The most recent episode was the appointment of conservative Rachida Dati as Minister of Culture, who was Hidalgo’s fiercest opponent in Paris. Some media have reported that the appointment includes an agreement so that Macron will support Dati to evict Hidalgo in the 2026 municipal elections. She says not to think about 2026, but about the Olympic Games, and what will remain: a greener city with more bikes, and a river clean enough to swim in. But critics point out that this is also the city whose population is in decline, is too expensive for the middle classes, and is falling into disrepair. Now her life is a countdown until the day when the planet turns its gaze to the city. A decade after becoming mayor, the moment of truth will be July 26, Saint Anne’s Day.

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