She wants to transform Paris into a green oasis for walkers and cyclists: promised by the re-elected mayor Anne Hidalgo. The 61-year-old socialist with Spanish roots confidently prevailed over President Nicolas Sarkozy’s former Justice Minister, Rachida Dati, in Sunday’s local elections. President Emmanuel Macron’s candidate, former health minister Agnès Buzyn, was relegated to third place.
“We must finally switch to green,” says Hidalgo, outlining her program for the next six years. Banning cars from the city, abolishing parking lots, bicycle highways and expanding parks: In conjunction with the strengthened greens, Hidalgo makes some stressed concrete haters in the French capital dream.
On the other hand, motorists, especially from the surrounding area, literally get them to the lawn. Hidalgo’s opponents burden her with the many construction sites. They also accuse her of having aggravated the notorious traffic jams in the capital by blocking the Seine embankment for traffic. Walkers are strolling there, hip ship bars serve aperitifs and recreational athletes and cyclists commute themselves.
The mayor also plans to plant 170,000 new trees and make the city, which has recently suffered from heat waves, fitter for climate change. In view of the skyrocketing property prices, Hidalgo wants to increase the share of social housing to 25 percent and issue stricter rules for the apartment broker Airbnb.
In Hidalgo’s first term, not only the heat record of 42.6 degrees last year and the devastating fire in the Notre-Dame cathedral fell, but also the terrorist attacks of 2015. The sometimes violent protests of the “yellow vests” followed and finally the protests against Macron’s pension reform that brought local transportation to a standstill for weeks.
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Hidalgo’s bourgeois opponent Dati accused Hidalgo in the election campaign of rotting the “city of love” and letting criminal gangs go. However, Dati was unable to prevail with her proposal of an armed city police and a security hotline.
“Paris is not clean enough,” Hidalgo admits self-critically. That promises to change until the Summer Olympics in Paris in 2024.
The mayor’s office in the capital is a springboard. Also for the presidential election in 2022? Hidalgo tirelessly emphasizes that she won’t want to compete against Macron. From her mouth it sounds like this: “Paris makes me perfectly happy.” (AFP)
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