With one week to go before local elections that will decide who takes Paris’s top job, the main candidates have seized on the issue of high pollution to score political points off each other, reports FRANCE 24.
There’s something nasty in the air in Paris, and it isn’t just the high pollution levels that have seen the city offer free public transport and impose a partial driving ban in a bid to reduce the number of cars.
Pollution has become the hot potato in an increasingly bitter debate ahead of this weekend’s local elections, a vote that will decide the outcome (indirectly) of the race to become the city’s new mayor.
Socialist candidate Anne Hidalgo, protégé and deputy to incumbent Mayor Bertrand Delanöe and favourite to win the mayoral race, fired the opening shots of an environment-themed mud-slinging match Saturday, accusing France’s Greens (EELV) of failing Paris by supporting the introduction of a new generation of diesel buses.
It was a clumsy and “undignified” accusation, French Housing Minister Cécile Duflot, a member of parliament for the EELV – in happy coalition with Hidalgo’s Socialists – said on Monday morning.
“I’m baffled,” she told RMC radio, explaining that the decision to invest in the buses, which are designed to be much less polluting than the existing fleet, had been made much earlier and that the Greens “really didn’t have any other choice, there was nothing else on the table”.
The Greens’ mayoral candidate Christophe Najdovski was also nonplussed with Hidalgo, “who doesn’t have anything to say about the pollution issue”.
He insisted Monday that the latest anti-pollution measures put in place by the city were “too little too late”.
“The state has been in total paralysis on the environment for the last 30 years,” he told BFMTV.
Read more of this report from FRANCE 24.