Though critics pinpointed Paris’s alleged dirtiness, lack of public transport, and insecurity before the Olympics started, the French capital’s mayor Anne Hidalgo, is now taking advantage of the 33rd Olympiad’s success to restore her image, ahead of the 2026 municipal elections.
From the start of the 2024 Olympic Games on 26 July, it seems nothing can spoil the party. The Paris Olympics has been a resounding success, despite the controversies that preceded the world’s biggest sporting event.
Socialist Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo (PS, S&D) managed to bathe in Paris’s notoriously polluted Seine river on 17 July, as it eventually met European cleanliness requirements, becoming the venue of the Olympic triathlon and marathon swimming competitions.
Hidalgo ended years of mockery by people who did not believe this was possible. Successfully dealing with the challenge that many French politicians failed to overcome, including former Paris mayor Jacques Chirac, who promised both in 1988 and 1990 that the Seine would be clean enough to swim “in three years,” but never materialised during his terms.
The total cost of cleaning the Seine is estimated at €1.4 billion, which her opponent for the Paris mayor seat and current Culture Minister Rachida Dati (LR, EPP) criticised.
A political victory over the far-right
“The message from the far right has been crushed by these games and by the opening ceremony,” the mayor of Paris told Le Monde in two interviews on 2 and 5 August.
In her view, the criticism she received in the run-up to the Olympic Games was the fault of “the reactionary planet and the extreme right […] Why? Because Paris is the city of all freedoms, the city of refuge for LGBTQI+ people, the city where people live together, a city where there is a woman mayor, a left-wing mayor, a mayor of foreign origin with dual nationality, a feminist mayor and an environmentalist mayor.”
Hidalgo, who is both French and Spanish, is settling political scores with Jordan Bardella’s far-right National Rally party (Patriots of Europe).
Bardella said during his campaign in the snap French parliamentary elections, in June and July, that he was in favour of refusing positions of high responsibility in the French administration to people with dual nationality, except for EU citizens.
Anne Hidalgo also took the opportunity to criticise the normalisation strategy of the populists.
“All populists, whether far-right, liberal or far-left, enter through the same door: damaging, and destroying an image, and pressing on the small fact or a real fact, which will amplify the negative message,” she told Le Monde.
Banking on the Olympics
For Hidalgo, left-wing parties must capitalise on the feel-good factor of the Olympic Games.
“We must try to understand together our collective strength, that we must not give up. This collective strength is also in the celebration,” she stated.
The New Popular Front (NFP), a coalition of left-wing parties ranging from communists to socialists, is still waiting for President Macron to nominate its candidate Lucie Castets as Prime Minister after the snap parliamentary elections.
Marine Tondelier (Les Ecologistes, The Greens), François Ruffin (former LFI, The Left), Raphaël Glucksmann (Place publique, S&D) and former French President François Hollande (PS, S&D) are also working to shape the French political landscape as the summer gets into full swing.
As for Hidalgo, who lost political influence in 2022, when during the Presidential elections she only won 1.75% of the votes in the first round. She may be considering a run for a third term as Paris mayor in 2026, using the success of the Paris Olympics as a platform.
Source: EURACTIV
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