The socialist mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, and her allies have laid down a political gauntlet for President Emanuel Macron. On Thursday February 25th, after the latest declarations by prime minister Jean Castex about the Covid-19 crisis, Hidalgo's deputy mayor Emmanuel Grégoire told Franceinfo radio that he regretted the “current situation” and the “wait-and-see” approach adopted by the French government over the last three weeks.
In that period the executive has refused to bring in a new national lockdown and has limited itself to weekend lockdowns in Nice and Dunkirk and a tightening of the curfew rules. “These are half-measures with bad results,” said the deputy mayor, who noted that the Covid-19 virus figures in the Paris region “were not good” and that the trend was “even less good”.
Gérgoire said that, following a suggestion from the prime minister, city hall in Paris was now looking at “complementary measures” that could be taken in the capital to control the virus. He rejected the idea of a weekend lockdown such as in Nice or Dunkirk but instead floated the possibility of a “stricter lockdown” lasting three weeks. The deputy mayor made clear that this was simply one “option” among others; but the idea was quickly picked up by the media and reported as if it were a concrete proposal.
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At a press conference the following morning Emmanuel Grégoire was forced to clarify what he had said. “First of all, we're not proposing to implement a lockdown in Paris because that's a decision for the national government,” he stated. “But we think that the policy of half-measures, with very questionable results, looks like it's coming to the end of its cycle.” And he insisted: “[A Paris lockdown] was never a proposal, I made three media appearances yesterday evening, it was never a proposal, it was an idea.”
In response the government's official spokesperson said that the executive would “study” the idea without appearing very convinced by it. “I hear very few scientists who say that you can defeat the virus in three weeks,” said spokesperson Gabriel Attal on France Inter radio. “In December Germany announced a three-week lockdown and they're still in it … because the [new virus] variants change the situation.”
Some members of the ruling La République en Marche (LREM) party quickly took advantage of what BFMTV news channel called city hall's “back-pedalling” to mock the mayor's stance. They pointed out that Anne Hidalgo's sights were on the presidential election in 2022 in which she may be a candidate.
Right-wing politicians in the capital also seized on the chance to attack the mayor. “For Madame Hidalgo, Paris is a fortress. The queen raises up the drawbridge and too bad for those who come to work in Paris every day, too bad for the rest of the Paris region. In any case, she looks upon people in the Paris region as her domestic servants!” said Nelly Garnier, a councillor for Les Républicains (LR) in Paris. Emmanuel Grégoire himself acknowledged on Twitter that such a lockdown would only make sense if it were imposed across the whole Paris region.
Yet aside from the tactical and political games of those concerned, the comments from city hall and the reaction it immediately provoked say a great deal about the way the French government boxed itself in several weeks ago. At the end of January, against all expectation and the opinion of several members of his own government – including prime minster Jean Castex and health minister Olivier Véran – Emmanuel Macron chose not to take advantage of the impending school holidays to announce a new national lockdown. Since then his entourage has spun a fawning narrative about the president's approach.
The view in the Élysée has been that Macron's decision ended the debate. Inside government aides acclaimed the president's “successful gamble”, rejoiced that the head of state had at last freed himself from the grip of scientific advisors, told anyone who would listen that their boss read everything about Covid-19, was invincible on the issue, and that he could easily “challenge” the best epidemiologists. Close Macron ally and president of the National Assembly Richard Ferrand even said that one day the president could aspire to passing the “agrégation” or top public education examination in immunology, Le Parisian newspaper reported.
At the same time politicians on the ground, including those in Paris, were telling themselves that Emmanuel Macron seemed so sure of himself that perhaps they should trust him, and that he was clearly seeing other figures and projections. Yet the figures these politicians were looking at were precisely the same figures that the government had. And they were very clear: at the start of January the Pasteur Institute and the health and medical research institute the Institut National de la Santé et de la Recherche Médicale (INSERM) explained that the English variant of the virus had every chance of becoming the dominant strain in the Paris region by the end of February. And that is what has happened; by the weekend of February 21st and 22nd this more infectious strain of the virus was accounting for more than 50% of cases in the French capital.
According to a close aide of Anne Hidalgo, the authorities should no longer stick with a policy option that was chosen before the new variant of the virus became dominant. Instead there should be a stricter lockdown coupled with a massive vaccination programme. “What we want to avoid is bringing in new restrictive measures but then end up having to lockdown again anyway,” said the same source. “We've been under a 6pm curfew for forty days, which is already very restrictive, and yet the situation continues to get worse.”
That is exactly the problem that Emmanuel Macron now faces: after a month of self-satisfaction, it is hard to see how the president can today simply admit that he was wrong. “You get the feeling that the government is handling the crisis based on the president's bravado,” said another source at city hall in Paris. “They're playing for time so that he doesn't have to reverse his decision.” To justify this analysis, critics point to the public briefing by prime minister Jean Castex this week, one of many that have taken place; politically, the government is trying to wait it out as long as it can.
When he raised the prospect of a stricter lockdown, city hall's Emmanuel Grégoire was merely echoing what the right-wing Les Républicains (LR) president of the Grand Est region, Jean Rottner, had called for at the end of January. It was also what the LR mayor of Nice Christian Estrosi was urging a few days ago, a call repeated only last Thursday February 25th by the LR mayor of Metz in north-east France, François Grosdidier. However, it is the first time that one local authority has stated so explicitly what many have been saying in private for three weeks. The socialist deputy Paris mayor Emmanuel Grégoire summed it up in this way: “Emmanuel Macron's wishes are not a sufficiently strong scientific argument to convince me.”
Such statements show that the head of state's solitary apporach to taking key decisions is coming under fire once again. The government may point to the consultations that it has with local authorities at meetings in Paris, but several people who regularly attend these gatherings say they do not really involve genuine cooperation. Instead they are more like “information updates”. The regional health authority or ARS presents the latest epidemiological data, the regional prefect listens to those present, but in the end the decisions are made by the president behind closed doors at meetings of the government's health defence council, the Conseil de Défense Sanitaire, at the Élysée.
Nonetheless, city hall in Paris insists that despite what the executive claims it is not out of step with the national government on every issues, for example on what should happen with schools. The virus is said to be circulating in educational establishments but officials in Paris say that closing them should only take place as a last resort because of the major consequences of such a move. “Our objective is to leave the schools open as long as possible and I gather that city hall in Paris is now calling for schools to be closed, which is not a trivial decision,” the government's spokesperson Gabriel Attal had claimed on France Inter radio. Yet the Paris authorities insist that they have come to no final view on the issue.
Meanwhile the centre-right president of the Paris region, Valérie Pécresse, suggested to prime minister Jean Castex at a recent meeting that the regional authority would help in carrying out mass testing in schools in the Paris region from this Monday, March 1st, when pupils return from holiday. Her entourage told Mediapart that city hall's idea of a lockdown for the the capital “makes no sense” as the approach needed to be carried out regionally. “A lockdown can't be ruled out but it should be avoided at all cost,” said a source. “There's a very deep economic and social crisis in the Paris region. We can't shut everything down again like that.”
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The original French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Michael Streeter