Our Lady of Paris
I hope the photo above will expunge the image of Boris Johnson dangling from a zipwire. In a choice between high-profile mayors of capital cities in the run-up to Olympics, I know which one I’d go for. For a start Anne Hidalgo’s swim in the Seine is not a stunt, but backed up by a solid track-record of green initiatives, as we’ll discover.
As Paris’s socialist mayor, elected for a second term in 2020, she has impeccable left-wing credentials. Her grandfather was a socialist who fled Spain at the end of the Civil War, but subsequently returned, only to face a life sentence. Her father was an electrician and her mother a seamstress; they became economic migrants to France in 1961, when Hidalgo was two. She grew up speaking Spanish with her parents, and French with her sister.
Her position as mayor is not the culmination of a long political career. She was for over a quarter of a century a civil servant, working in various senior posts on labour and training. Mayoring is therefore something she has taken up in retirement, and she now sets a pace that her officials find it hard to keep up with: 6.30 am starts, and she rarely gets home before 11pm. She would stoutly defend anyone’s right to work/life balance, but it’s just not for her…
Two significant events marked the early days of her tenure: the murders of the Charlie Hebdo journalists and the terrorist attack on the Bataclan nightclub. She held the city together with her compassion and determination, and has continued to manifest both these qualities throughout her terms as mayor: her habit of breaking away from her entourage to meet and greet her fellow citizens gives her security detail the jitters and she has driven through her green policies for the capital with a steeliness that more timid politicians can only envy.
Motorists may be disgruntled, but she has transformed the centre of Paris since taking office. The ring road (périphérique) that divided the left and right banks of the Seine from the rest of the city have been swept away; the Place de la République and the Place de la Bastille have become more pedestrian-friendly; she has introduced 1000km of cycle lanes and had 200,000 new trees planted – all leading to a 1000% increase in cycling and a 40% decline in air pollution. No wonder she won the 2023 Urban Land Institute Prize for Visionaries in Urban Development.
This is by no means the only award to have come her way. Wikipedia lists a number of gongs, including, not surprisingly, France’s own Knight of the Legion of Honour, as well as Commander of the Order of the Pole Star from Sweden, and, oddly, Commander of the Order of Isabella the Catholic, given that Hidalgo is a confirmed atheist.
She is also committed to diversity in its widest possible sense, and since 2014 Paris’s Participatory Budgeting scheme has allowed residents to vote on schemes put forward by their fellow residents. When she nominated 11 women to her 16-strong senior team, she fell foul of a French civil service rule that specifies a maximum of 60% of one gender in leadership positions, incurring a £90,000 fine for city hall.
May the Olympic gods smile on her, and her green legacy grow and consolidate.
What a fascinating leader!
Thanks Verity for sharing such interesting details of her life.
Sadly I don’t think the Olympic gods have smiled on her so far, with all that rain!