Anne Hidalgo, the mayor who manages Olympic paradoxes

Abroad, Anne Hidalgo (San Fernando, Cádiz, 64 years old) 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, with her, the city has become dirtier and uglier, more inhospitable.

After the catastrophic result in the 2022 elections, in which she was a socialist candidate and obtained 1.75% of the votes, many thought that Hidalgo's career was coming to an end. It was not knowing her. She resisted. She now 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 in 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.

The 2024 Olympic Games, between July 26 and August 11, will be the decisive moment in the career of this daughter of Spanish immigration who arrived in France at the age of two. Maybe revenge. Despite the setbacks and criticism, despite the general pessimism in Paris and France, despite the little enthusiasm that is currently being felt on the street, if everything goes well she could look like the Olympic mayor, her face (along with that of the 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 after D-Day, she explains that there are still pending tasks. Metro transportation must be improved, which is not the responsibility of the city, and he is concerned about the nearly 3,000 homeless people in the capital and the lack of shelters for them: in this case, too, he 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.”

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

“Daughter of an immigrant and a worker, with each passing day I saw myself more as a daughter of France, because the school gave a feeling of belonging to all the children who were in my case,” the mayor wrote in the book A French woman (a French woman, unedited in Spanish). Ideologically, she is a classic social democrat, in a country in which the Socialist Party is almost residual and is led by a current that is not hers. She is opposed to both Macron's liquid centrism and the populist and Eurosceptic left, which refused to call Hamas a terrorist after the attack against Israel on October 7.

It was the Islamist attacks in Paris in 2015, precisely when she had been in the Mayor's Office for a year, that decided 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 moment that returned strength to the city and the country. A moment of “joy and fraternity” in a world of wars and populism.

And it is true that, for 15 days, the city will be the best scenario imaginable: the opening ceremony on the Seine, the backdrop of the Eiffel Tower and monumental Paris; Notre Dame which, after the 2019 fire, must 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 Games are always much more than Games. And less. The political quarrels, the jealousy, the fights over the photo. Relations between Macron and Hidalgo are complicated. The most recent episode has been the appointment of conservative Rachida Dati, Hidalgo's fiercest opponent in Paris, as Minister of Culture. Some media have published that the signing includes an agreement so that, in the 2026 municipal elections, Macron supports Dati to evict Hidalgo. 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 suitable for bathing in. But this is also the city, critics point out, that is losing population, that is too expensive for the middle classes, that is degrading. Now his life is a countdown until the day when the planet sets its sights on the city. A decade after becoming mayor, the moment of truth. July 26, Saint Anne's Day.

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