If a week is a long time in politics, an adage attributed to former British prime minister Harold Wilson, the two years between now and the holding of municipal elections in Paris in 2020 is an aeon. Those hoping to take the highly prestigious and politically strategic post of mayor of the capital from the socialist incumbent Anne Hidalgo are only too aware of the minefield of unpredictable events ahead.
Hidalgo, 59, who was elected mayor in 2014, succeeding her fellow socialist Bertrand Delanoë, who she had served as deputy over his entire 13-year term, is expected to seek re-election. But she has recently encountered a series of embarrassments, not least the chaotic and ill-planned replacement of the city’s bicycle share scheme, and the total collapse of its electric car share system. But above all perhaps her biggest handicap is her personal management style, which her critics, including some among her Paris council majority, denounce variously as authoritarian, impulsive and divisive.
Enlargement : Illustration 1
Her ambition to remain in the post took another major blow this week with the resignation of her deputy, Bruno Julliard, who had served as her campaign manager in 2014. “Since several months, sharp disagreements on orientation and methods of governance have distanced us,” he said on Monday when he announced he was stepping down as deputy-mayor and head of Paris City Hall’s cultural affairs programme. He said he had “on several occasions” made known his “concern about a certain inconsistency and a manner of governing by instinct”.
“Our initial complementarity has become incompatibility,” he added. “I don’t believe anymore. I don’t want to pretend.”
Before his announcement, Julliard was among those interviewed by Mediapart this summer for an article about the behind-the-scenes atmosphere at Paris City Hall – housed in the imposing riverside Hôtel de Ville rebuilt in the 19th century – and the scheming and positioning for the 2020 elections. Anne Hidalgo was unavailable for an interview requested by Mediapart, while many of those Mediapart spoke to, including councillors and city hall staff, requested that their name was withheld.
All of the potential runners for mayor in 2020, from across the political spectrum, focus on the personality of Anne Hidalgo, either in public or in private. For all of them, the post of Paris mayor represents a powerful political fiefdom like few others, as illustrated by former conservative leader Jacques Chirac, whose many years as mayor, before becoming French president, was tainted by corruption.
“We’re organising things methodically, and with little noise,” commented Benjamin Griveaux, spokesman for Emmanuel Macron’s centrist government, whose intention to run for mayor is no longer secret. Meanwhile, Gaspard Gantzer, once an advisor to former socialist president François Hollande, and who recently launched his movement 'Parisiens, Parisiennes' declared that, “Parisians won’t necessarily want [a political] alternance, but they will want a change”. Danielle Simonnet, a Paris councillor from the radical-left France insoumise (France unbowed) party has already thrown her hat into the ring as a “candidate for the candidature”, describing the situation at the City Hall as being “the end of a cycle”, that of political policies which “treated the symptoms and not the causes”.
One of Hidalgo’s closest advisors at city hall, whose name is withheld, says her current problems notably began in the autumn of 2017 with the publication of a book, Notre-Drame de Paris (Our drama of Paris, in a play on the name of Notre Dame), by journalists Nadia Le Brun and Airy Routier in which they gave a damning judgment on Hidalgo’s first three years in office. They variously described the mayor, who is of Spanish family origin, as the “pasionaria” of social affairs, and “the queen of traffic jams”.
She is accused of wasting the political heritage of Delanoë, whose sometimes innovative policies broke with the previous 24 years of rightwing dominance of City Hall. Among the numerous criticisms levelled against her is her management of public areas. “We’ve got progress to make about that,” admitted Rémi Féraud, a former socialist mayor of the 10th arrondissement of Paris (all 20 arrondissements have mayors, but who are considerably less powerful than the capital’s overall mayor), and who was Hidalgo’s election campaign director in 2014. For Gaspard Gantzer, “Parisians have the feeling of a degradation of their public areas”. Problems include the explosion in the rat population (exacerbated by the flooding of the river Seine in 2016 which brought many fleeing into public spaces), and the failure to adequately deal with piled-up rubbish in the streets, made worse by the introduction of ‘green’ plant boxes around the base of trees which became transformed into makeshift dumping grounds for waste (800 of them were eventually removed). “Anne Hidalgo is into grand things, but when it comes down to concrete matters there’s nobody present,” said Benjamin Griveaux.
Taken up last year with the Paris bid to host the 2024 Olympic Games, which the city finally won, even her own political allies on the city council admit that the mayor’s international agenda was perceived by some as removing her from the day-to-day problems of the city’s population. Her political opponents increasingly denounced an excessive authoritarianism and woeful management skills.
“It was very difficult for her to exist in the shadow of Bertrand Delanoë,” said a former City Hall official, whose name is withheld. “The necessity of killing the father had fermented for some while. Her mistake was to personify authoritarianism herself, without leaving her last cabinet chief the task of doing so.” Some of those who have known her for long believe that the lack of consideration towards her when she served as Delanoë’s deputy, and the occasionally demeaning insults towards her by City Hall insiders during her bid to become mayor, left her with a thirst for revenge.
“Her method of governing is too vertical, she sometimes gives the impression of always being right and she can show dogmatism in decision-taking,” said independent rightwing Paris MP and councillor Pierre-Yves Bournazel, who nevertheless tempers his criticism of Hidalgo. “I have clear differences over her governance, but I respect her person and the post she occupies. She is a combatant.”
While Hidalgo has undoubtedly been the object of crass misogyny, many among both her political opponents and her allies are irritated by her comments that she is criticised to such an extent simply because she is a woman. “The point about sexism is right, but it remains a minority issue,” said one of her close political entourage. “What’s more, it’s not for her to make the point. To bring it to the fore as she does is also to reinforce the criticism over her incapacity to place herself in question.”
Auditers found City Hall overstaffed, and staff overpaid
Among the issues that have brought Hidalgo in for sharp criticism is the decision, as part of a strategy to reduce the numbers of vehicles in the city, to close to traffic a large portion of the right-bank riverside express roads that run along the River Seine’s path through central Paris. “The manner in which it was done was perceived as being brutal, sectarian,” admitted a city councillor allied to Hidalgo. Her proposal to turn them over exclusively to pedestrians and bicycles was adopted by the members of the Paris council in September 2016 despite the conclusion by a public commission of enquiry against the project, essentially because it found that the move would in fact increase road congestion around the capital. In the end, the project has proved to have had little positive effect on vehicle emission rates in the capital.
In February this year, an administrative tribunal subsequently annulled the decision to close the riverside roads to traffic, arguing that the City Hall’s studies of the side effects of the closure had been marred by “imprecision” and “omissions”. An appeal against the tribunal’s verdict is to be heard later this autumn.
Another issue is what has become the fiasco surrounding the collapse of the initial Vélib’ bicycle hire scheme, whereby members of the public could hire bikes from more than 1,200 bike-stations dotted around the capital on a ‘take it here leave it there’ basis that proved highly popular, similar to that in other European capitals including London. Launched in 2007, the initial operator JCDecaux lost its licence in 2017 after City Hall had put the management of the system up for tender, and the appointment of the new operator, Smovengo, has since proved chaotic, notably because of insufficient new replacement bikes, delays in electrical work on the bike stations, and flaws in the data processing systems. The number of user-subscribers fell from around 300,000 in 2017 to about 220,000 this year. “Smovengo clearly has not been up to the task,” commented one City Hall official.
Enlargement : Illustration 2
Many in Hidalgo’s own political majority on the council regard the crash of the popular system as their biggest single problem, one of them describing it as “the one that will leave its mark” as the elections in 2020 loom. A City Hall official who was close to the negotiations with Smovengo said the company ticked all the boxes on the requirements for the tender and crucially offered to take on the operation for less than the sum demanded by JCDecaux. “To not have chosen them would have led us straight before court for favouritism,” he said.
Finally, there is the similar collapse this year, this time total, of the Autolib electric car hire service. This was a scheme that mirrored Vélib’, whereby the public, against a yearly base subscription, could hire what were small electric vehicles from dedicated charging stations set up around the capital, again on a ‘take it here leave it there’ basis. The operator, a branch of the Bolloré Group, ceased the activity in August this year after it failed to reach agreement for compensation over the scheme’s heavy losses.
Those close to Hidalgo at City hall, however, suggest that these are storms she can ride out. One of them, Communist Party member Ian Brossat, who is in charge of city housing programmes, said the opposition to the controversial closure of the riverside roads has already diminished. “No candidate would propose re-opening them, on this subject we’ve won,” he said.
“Transport issues always raise momentary hysteria,” tempered one of Hidalgo’s cabinet team. “[Former Paris mayor] Bertrand Delanoë paid the price during his first term with the [introduction of] bus lanes and the work [which narrowed private traffic lanes] carried out on the Magenta and Port-Royal boulevards, but people forget it afterwards.”
That could well prove to be wishful thinking. The City Hall has opened an administrative inquiry into the Smovengo disaster which Hidalgo herself said in July was “to check upon the responsibilities […] for the failures that are still today apparent”. A meeting is to be held with Smovengo at the end of September which is regarded as decisive for its future operations. The combined chaos around the bike rental scheme and that of Autolib’ has handed precious ammunition for Hidalgo’s rivals for the 2020 elections; among them is the current government spokesman Benjamin Griveaux who has slammed Hidalgo’s “bad management” adding that, in both cases, “At the very least it’s a lack of attention and unpreparedness”. Confidentially, a number of Hidalgo’s allies agree, and there has been conflictual finger pointing in the corridors of the Hôtel de Ville.
But beyond the question of the competence of one person or another, the undeniable dysfunctions reveal a certain rigidity in the City Hall structure which in turn reflects on Hidalgo’s style of management. Under her are three decision-making structures; one is that of administrative managers, who are expected to have a technical competence; there are also the elected councillors in charge of one programme or another and who are given the title of deputy-mayor; finally, there are the members of Hidalgo’s cabinet, hand-picked by her. All three are rarely in agreement and all have different claims to their legitimacy in decision making, and reaching a consensus can be a lengthy process.
“The functioning is quite pyramidical,” commented Bruno Julliard, speaking before his resignation this week. “Eventual conflicts are structural.” While Bertrand Delanoë has been described by some insiders as “methodical” and “technical”, one member of her council majority described Hidalgo as “supple” to the point that, “some experience that as a daily shambles, and it’s true”. One City Hall manager, a public employee, denounced the role of sycophants among the so called special or strategic advisors of uncertain competence. “There are courtiers, and they are not always the best,” he said.
In October 2017, the regional department of France’s national audit body, the Cour de comptes, sharply criticised City Hall for exceeding officially allowed staff numbers, paying notably high salaries, and the existence of some jobs that involved fewer working hours than was legal. On top of that, the auditors found there were incidents of bonuses and compensations being paid without justification.
A mayor split between 'old Left' and 'Macronists'
But Hidalgo has gained admiration from some quarters for her single-minded actions. “She has fixed ideas, she goes about things head first, sometimes too much so, but it has very much helped us on some issues,” said Bruno Julliard in an interview earlier this summer before his decisison to resign. The example of this that is most often cited by her supporters is when, on May 31st 2016, she announced to her staff that she intended giving a press conference several hours later that day when she would announce the creation of a “humanitarian camp” for migrants at the Porte de la Chapelle in northern Paris. The move, to offer some degree of comfort and sanitation for those sleeping rough in atrocious conditions, went against the grain for the then-socialist government, part of her political family. Her announcement took the interior ministry by surprise, just as it did also her own administration which was given six weeks to organise the project.
Two years on, the “bubble” as it was nicknamed because of its inflatable architecture, has gone, but it is estimated to have given shelter to a total of about 25,000 migrants. Hidalgo has continually found herself at odds with successive interior ministers, including the current one, Gérard Collomb, over the management of migrant numbers in the French capital and, above all, in opposition to heavy-handed evacuations of migrant settlements. Her approach to the migrant issue is one that her close team hope will help her in the 2020 elections. “Parisians are very progressist and very humanist,” commented one of her advisors. “They are engaged in these issues of society.”
Hidalgo’s council majority is made up of socialists, communists, Greens and the centre-right, and as 2020 approaches she will have to decide whether to stand on a platform of opposition to Emmanuel Macron or, on the contrary, attempt to make a pact with Macron’s LREM party. Hidalgo appears to have been taken by surprise – like others – by Macron’s election as president last year, and the subsequent landslide victory of his party in general elections that saw the LREM take 13 out of the 18 parliamentary constituencies in the capital. According to some, she had placed her bets on the presidential election victory of conservative candidate François Fillon (who was tipped early as the frontrunner until he became engulfed by a corruption scandal over allegations he gave fake jobs to members of his family), and had believed that she would be then be well placed to stand as socialist presidential candidate in the next elections, due in 2022.
Enlargement : Illustration 3
But Macron’s election and the implosion of the Socialist Party has thrown any such calculations by the wayside. Her relationship with Macron got off to a bad start when he was the socialist government’s economy and industry minister. During 2015 she opposed his moves to free up Sunday working restrictions, when Macron sought to hand the authority for decisions on Sunday commerce in the capital to the local prefect. The case went to the Constitutional council which found in favour of Hidalgo. One source who was close to the dispute said it caused a rupture of the relationship between the two. “When she considers that a relationship of confidence is broken, it’s over,” he said. “She has a wholehearted character. That’s a human quality, but a political weakness. She cannot excommunicate people in that way.”
Nevertheless, since Macron’s election Hidalgo has toned down her hostility towards him, although she has continued to voice opposition to some of his decisions. That was the case in cuts his government announced in October last year in the social housing budget, when she addressed to all those living in social housing in the capital a letter setting out her opposition to the move. In June she gave an interview to the weekly paper JDD sharply criticising a “hardening” of policies towards migrants by Macron’s government which, she said “is difficult to understand”.
Government spokesman Benjamin Griveaux’ attacks on Hidalgo suggest that Macron’s LREM party will run against the outgoing mayor in 2020, and while Griveaux is angling to be its candidate for the office other names are circulating, even including the Macron’s prime minister, Édouard Philippe. But importantly, on numerous issues the policies of the LREM party are not clearly distant from those of Hidalgo. “For the moment, I don’t see a credible alternative project,” said Bruno Julliard earlier this summer.
Hidalgo will have to try and maintain the cohesion of her heteroclite council majority over the next two years, giving each element something to please them. The Left broadly appreciate her approach to migration and protection of the environment, while to the Right she meets with approval for moves like her proposed “reflection” over the arming of the capital’s municipal police.
“Anne Hidalgo is split between her culture of the old plural Left and her desire to follow close on the heels of the Macronists, whose fascination for the private sector she shares, persuaded that that’s where progress lies,” commented EELV Green party councillor Jérôme Gleizes. Meanwhile, Danielle Simonnet, Paris councillor for the radical-left France Insoumise (France unbowed) party (and who has the ambition of standing against Hidalgo) complained: “There is a slide to the Right and each time the cocos [communists] lie down.”
That assertion is contradicted by Nicolas Bonnet Oulaldj, who heads the group of Communist Party councillors. “Anne Hidalgo must position herself,” he said. “Does she want Paris to become ‘The City’, as the Macronsist want, or that it is a place where the lower and middle classes can live? In my view, she should try to recover the electorate that has gone to [radical-left France Insoumise party leader Jean-Luc] Mélenchon and stop playing with ambiguity over the LREM.”
Another councillor from her majority coalition, asking not to be named, returned to the question of Hidalgo’s personal style. “She must stop having this feeling of being all-powerful and realise that her personality poses a problem,” he said. “There is a very clear tension in opinions about her personality, and some seriously question themselves about her effectiveness.”
-------------------------
- The French version of this article can be found here.