Yahoo News Café culture, green streets, a jazz-dancing mayor — Paris is back
The scenes of joy outside the Paris Hôtel de Ville on Sunday, when socialist Anne Hidalgo was re-elected mayor, felt like a return to normality for the French capital. With a wide smile and clutching bouquets of red roses, Hidalgo stepped out to greet supporters who had gathered outside the town hall near the Seine. Later that evening, she was to be found dancing to live jazz. It was — almost — as if Covid-19 had never happened.
Hidalgo’s election marks the end of an extraordinary 12 months in Paris. A year ago, polls suggested the Spanish-born candidate, and first female mayor of the city, would be defeated. Residents grumbled about dirty streets, constant roadworks, horrendous traffic jams and a fiasco over the bike-sharing scheme. Her decision to close the quay along the Seine to traffic, and turn it over to cyclists, joggers and walkers, had been contested in court. As many as 58 per cent of residents said they were unhappy with Hidalgo’s tenure (she was first elected in 2014).
For Emmanuel Macron, Paris was his for the taking. When he was elected President in 2017, he scored 90 per cent of the vote in the capital in the run-off against Marine Le Pen. Compared with London, Paris is a small compact city, with just over two million residents. It is administratively cut off from its car-dependent suburbs, and disproportionately populated by the younger and better-educated. Just the sort of people, in other words, who backed Mr Macron’s campaign for the presidency under the banner of “En Marche!” Internal party rivalries for the Paris race, however, followed by a sexting scandal that brought down Macron’s original candidate, Benjamin Griveaux, crushed the President’s hopes. His replacement candidate, Agnès Buzyn, came in third.
In the end, Hidalgo’s brand matched the moment. In a governing coalition with Europe Écologie Les Verts (the Greens), she was seen as an anti-car crusader and champion of cycling even before Covid-19 struck. During lockdown, the Rue de Rivoli, which runs through the city centre along the edge of the Tuileries Gardens, was turned over almost entirely to cyclists. Some 50km of temporary bike lanes were created. The silence that enveloped the capital, when cars were scarce and bicycle wheels could be heard turning on cobbles, probably helped voters decide that Hidalgo was on to something.
Interestingly, Parisians did not hold their mayor responsible for the Covid-19 crisis. Île-de-France, which covers Paris and its surrounding area, was one of the country’s worst-hit regions, with 7,441 hospital deaths, 38 per cent of the national total. Yet neither hospitals nor the Paris police force are under the town hall’s control. Even the opening of gated Paris parks, which Hidalgo argued for, was not the mayor’s responsibility. When crowds gathered in the sunshine along the Canal Saint-Martin after lockdown was lifted on May 11, it was Christophe Castaner, the interior minister, who stepped in under emergency provisions to ban alcohol there and disperse people. So Hidalgo has in some ways escaped the blame for the constraints and casualties of Covid, while reaping the benefits of the new greener mood. Of course, Paris is not Amsterdam. Bicycle lanes in the city end abruptly in places. Cars and delivery vans still traverse the capital. The périphérique ring road remains a gigantic concrete belt around the city that is perilous for cyclists to breach. Nonetheless, something has changed in Paris, and it may well last.
A year ago polls said Anne Hidalgo would be defeated. But her brand matched the moment: anti-car, pro-cycling
Part of this is a new negotiation about the use of public space. For the better part of June, unlike the rest of the country, Paris was not yet a safe “green zone”. Restaurants could open, but only on the outdoor terrasse, and tables had to be spaced a metre apart. So terrace cafés have spilled out along the pavements, and into parking spaces on the road, in a bid for territory approved by Hidalgo. Indeed she has urged a “new way of thinking” about urban space. For now, the newly colonised pavements remain.
The real test of how to divide space between pedestrians and motorists will probably be delayed until after the summer, when people return in numbers to work. In the meantime, the city still feels fairly empty, with almost no foreign tourists and fewer cars than usual. Parisians have already had a month to enjoy their terrace cafés and restaurants, mostly in glorious sunshine. They would probably be astonished to learn that Londoners haven’t even begun to do so.
The Economist’s Paris Bureau Chief and author of Revolution Française: Emmanuel Macron and the quest to reinvent a nation (Bloomsbury)
