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Broadly speaking, Hidalgo faces the grave indictment of having played havoc with Paris’s poetic beauty. A city that inspires adoration is governed by a mayor who provokes widespread invective and teeth-gnashing, some of it undeserved, among Parisians who have soured on her and the vast changes she has made to the urban landscape.
Hidalgo was instrumental in bringing the Olympics to Paris and has stamped them with her priorities. The city’s new Adidas Arena is topped with photovoltaic panels that will convert the sun’s energy into electricity and features green building materials, including what officials call “virtuous bricks,” made of locally sourced material.
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The Paris Games are designed as spectacle even by Olympic standards. Past Opening Ceremonies have been stadium events, but the Paris Olympics’ first day, July 26, is expected to feature 10,000 athletes borne on hundreds of barges down four miles of the Seine, its banks thronged with hundreds of thousands of spectators.
It will be an extravaganza — and a potential security nightmare — for the ages.
This will be Hidalgo’s moment, a turning of the page from a dismal 2022 presidential campaign when she finished in 10th place with less than 2 percent of the vote. But what will the world make of a mayor who has sacrificed popularity on the altar of her vision of a sustainable future?
“Mayors in Europe and around the world are in fact telling me that if it works in Paris, it means that they can do it, too,” she says.
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For the Games, 15 million visitors are expected, several times the city’s usual summer crush of tourists. Gorgeous as usual, central Paris is now burnished to a high gleam, notwithstanding the habitual piles of trash, bustling rat colonies and sidewalks smeared with dog feces. Notre Dame cathedral, nearly destroyed by a 2019 fire, is again luminous, as a stunningly quick reconstruction nears completion; its rebuilt spire, now shrouded in scaffolding, is expected to be unveiled in time for the Games. And a vast cleanup of the Seine is intended to make it suitable for the Games’ open-water swimming events, and for downtown bathing for the first time in a century.
The sweep of Hidalgo’s broad brush has created hundreds of miles of new bike lanes and cleared streets, squares and plazas for pedestrians. She has pushed transit, planted trees and embraced the “15-minute city” as a secular religion — the idea that shops, schools and cultural venues should be within a quarter-hour’s trip for everyone, without resorting to a car.
Her vision has come at a cost. It includes a city center and adjacent areas that are largely the province of tourists and the rich, and a squeezed middle class that has left for the suburbs, where contempt for Hidalgo is rampant. Paris’s population has dropped by more than 120,000 over the past decade, a loss hailed by Hidalgo, with her usual tin ear, as a welcome reduction in density. Her antidote to the soaring cost of living, subsidies that cover about one-quarter of the housing stock, has contributed to a ballooning deficit and skyrocketing local property taxes.
Querulous Parisians are furious about the Olympics; many plan to flee the city. For her part, the mayor remains woodenly on message.
“For some, politics is entertainment,” she says. “For me, it’s about policy. It’s about local politics and getting things done.”
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PARIS — Wine is served with lunch in the mayor’s sun-soaked private dining room in Paris’s city hall — this is France, after all — but she takes only tea. Anne Hidalgo is all business.
She presides at the Hôtel de Ville, the sumptuous, 600-room municipal headquarters where, at a table set for 15, handsomely printed menu cards announce an excellent meal — burrata with lamb’s lettuce, perfectly cooked cod, chocolate éclairs. It is a slightly discordant setting for a Socialist Party stalwart, 10 years in the job, who is lionized by urban planners, widely detested by French voters and, these days, laser-focused on preparations for this summer’s Olympic and Paralympic Games, the city’s first in a century.
Hidalgo, at age 64, is a paradox of her own making. She has relentlessly pressed radical policies to remake the world’s most beautiful city as a bikeable, walkable and soon, she hopes, swimmable eco-paradise. And she has leveraged the Games as an accelerator for that agenda, animated by her conviction that global warming will make the city unlivable in a quarter-century unless drastic action is taken.
But she is a poor advocate for her signature war on cars and carbon emissions, projecting an iron will that reads as arrogant, tone-deaf, self-righteous.
That, along with her policies — and probably a dose of sexism — has contributed to the loathing she elicits. It is acute among contractors, taxi drivers, suburbanites and others who use the roads in Paris, a city of 2 million choked with traffic on the ever-shrinking numbers of streets where cars are permitted.
Broadly speaking, Hidalgo faces the grave indictment of having played havoc with Paris’s poetic beauty. A city that inspires adoration is governed by a mayor who provokes widespread invective and teeth-gnashing, some of it undeserved, among Parisians who have soured on her and the vast changes she has made to the urban landscape.
Hidalgo was instrumental in bringing the Olympics to Paris and has stamped them with her priorities. The city’s new Adidas Arena is topped with photovoltaic panels that will convert the sun’s energy into electricity and features green building materials, including what officials call “virtuous bricks,” made of locally sourced material.
The Paris Games are designed as spectacle even by Olympic standards. Past Opening Ceremonies have been stadium events, but the Paris Olympics’ first day, July 26, is expected to feature 10,000 athletes borne on hundreds of barges down four miles of the Seine, its banks thronged with hundreds of thousands of spectators.
It will be an extravaganza — and a potential security nightmare — for the ages.
This will be Hidalgo’s moment, a turning of the page from a dismal 2022 presidential campaign when she finished in 10th place with less than 2 percent of the vote. But what will the world make of a mayor who has sacrificed popularity on the altar of her vision of a sustainable future?
“Mayors in Europe and around the world are in fact telling me that if it works in Paris, it means that they can do it, too,” she says.
For the Games, 15 million visitors are expected, several times the city’s usual summer crush of tourists. Gorgeous as usual, central Paris is now burnished to a high gleam, notwithstanding the habitual piles of trash, bustling rat colonies and sidewalks smeared with dog feces. Notre Dame cathedral, nearly destroyed by a 2019 fire, is again luminous, as a stunningly quick reconstruction nears completion; its rebuilt spire, now shrouded in scaffolding, is expected to be unveiled in time for the Games. And a vast cleanup of the Seine is intended to make it suitable for the Games’ open-water swimming events, and for downtown bathing for the first time in a century.
The sweep of Hidalgo’s broad brush has created hundreds of miles of new bike lanes and cleared streets, squares and plazas for pedestrians. She has pushed transit, planted trees and embraced the “15-minute city” as a secular religion — the idea that shops, schools and cultural venues should be within a quarter-hour’s trip for everyone, without resorting to a car.
Her vision has come at a cost. It includes a city center and adjacent areas that are largely the province of tourists and the rich, and a squeezed middle class that has left for the suburbs, where contempt for Hidalgo is rampant. Paris’s population has dropped by more than 120,000 over the past decade, a loss hailed by Hidalgo, with her usual tin ear, as a welcome reduction in density. Her antidote to the soaring cost of living, subsidies that cover about one-quarter of the housing stock, has contributed to a ballooning deficit and skyrocketing local property taxes.
Querulous Parisians are furious about the Olympics; many plan to flee the city. For her part, the mayor remains woodenly on message.
“For some, politics is entertainment,” she says. “For me, it’s about policy. It’s about local politics and getting things done.”
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