PARIS — The battle to win the hearts of Parisians and preside over France’s capital from the opulent city hall, has been nasty, and unpredictable.
Parisians have been dished up a sex video scandal that triggered the surprise withdrawal of the candidate for President Emmanuel Macron’s party, a last-minute replacement and mud-slinging about the filth of Paris streets, bedbugs and rats. As today’s first round of municipal elections approaches, voters have been left to contemplate the underbelly of the City of Light.
Three women top polls, including incumbent Mayor Anne Hidalgo, a Socialist best known for her divisive effort to rid Paris of cars. She wants to create “mini-forests” with 170,000 newly-planted trees and make the city center fully bicycle-friendly.
Trees, plenty of them, from urban forests to planted promenades, made a late appearance on the agendas of most of the eight candidates in the Paris race of France’s municipal elections.
The nationwide voting is about local issues and centers on choosing the mayor, traditionally the most liked political figure among French. But local elections can help lay the groundwork for presidential voting in two years, so the stakes are high, and Paris — where the next mayor will host the 2024 Olympics — is the crown jewel.
Macron risks a huge humiliation. His centrist party, The Republic on the Move, which he created from scratch before his 2017 election, lacks local power bases, meaning it is likely to fare poorly.
Seized during the French Revolution, set afire in a brutal 1871 repression, Paris City Hall, drenched in 338 statues and grander than the presidential Elysee Palace, is indeed a plum. Protocol demands that visiting heads of state visit the Paris mayor.
Rachida Dati, a conservative justice minister under former President Nicolas Sarkozy, is tasting victory. A reborn Dati, who exchanged her extravagant tastes for no-nonsense dress and an austere style, is running neck-and-neck with Hidalgo. Dati puts cleaning up Paris streets and securing them with armed municipal police and a plethora of video cameras her priority.
“It’s anarchy everywhere” and “revolting filth,” she said in a recent debate when candidates threw daggers at Hidalgo.
Third in recent polls and late-comer, Agnes Buzyn, a physician, was no kinder to the current mayor, saying that “we will all die” if Paris, Europe’s most densely populated capital, doesn’t cool down, a reference to the omnipresent concrete and Hidalgo’s project to build more towers.
Buzyn, a medical doctor, was plucked from her job as health minister in mid-February amid the world crisis over the deadly COVID-19 virus to replace Macron’s candidate. Clearly pitching for votes from the conservative camp, she too wants armed municipal police for the capital she grew up in, along with clean streets.
Most of the five other candidates have cameo roles — but could prove crucial to forming alliances ahead of the March 22 second round — or the so-called third round when newly elected city councilors choose the new Paris mayor who ultimately is indirectly elected.
