Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo on Olympic terror threat: ‘We cannot have a city paralysed by fear – we won’t hide’

7 comments

1. **From The Telegraph’s Celia Walden, interviewing Anne Hidalgo:**

   “I have to be honest and tell you that here in France, we live in a country that continues to have an absolutely crazy machismo.” Anne Hidalgo widens her eyes, shakes her head and repeats: “Crazy! Being a woman in politics – being [mayor of Paris](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2023/11/07/anne-hidalgo-paris-mayor-tahiti-work-trip-holiday-daughter/) – one really feels that.”

   The 64-year-old isn’t talking about the French people, she wants to stress, but the way [women are portrayed in the media](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2024/01/23/women-quitting-being-fired-top-jobs-more-than-men/) there. “The representation of women here – particularly women in power – is horrible. We’re supposed to be crazy, hard, what else…” “Hysterical,” provides her adviser. “Of course, hysterical.” “Emotional,” I offer up. “Always emotional,” she agrees. “Oh, and if you then start to tackle the issue of air pollution, car traffic and so on, you become the ‘little lady’ who wants to prevent these gentlemen from using the powerful machines with which they will show their virility.”

   In her sleek navy suit, cream silk camisole and point-toe high-heeled boots, the Cádiz-born mayor – appointed in 2014 – is as cool and self-assured as they come. She’s well aware that her ethos as a socialist, a feminist and an ecologist, intent on reinventing Paris as a green metropolis, has made her a divisive figure locally and nationally (in a 2022 presidential run, she won 1.75 per cent of the votes).

   The fact that one report shows air pollution has decreased by more than 40 per cent over the past decade, and that there are now [870 miles of cycle lanes in Paris](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/03/17/cyclists-have-turned-paris-into-hell-on-earth/) (compared with some 125 in 2001), isn’t seen as favourably by some Parisians as it is by the outside world. And although “Paris is breathing better”, she insists, adding that “it has been three years since I’ve had to issue a caution [regarding air quality], prohibiting children from playing in schoolyards”, Hidalgo is the first to admit that “I have lived through periods of very, very intense bashing”. 

   On X/Twitter – which she branded “a gigantic global sewer” when she quit the platform last November – Parisians continue to rage about the visually unappealing work sites across the capital under the #SaccageParis (WreckParis) hashtag. Memes of the greenery being planted across the city – #vegetation – are gaining traction (with one friend sending me an image of a shrub-topped bus stop, captioned with puce-faced emojis). Yet this “little lady” refuses to be cowed.

   “It’s hard,” she concedes. “It is.” Particularly when “people blow up one detail into a big thing. All my numerous opponents on the extreme Left and the extreme Right started taking photos of the slightest piece of waste paper [in the street],” she rolls her eyes. “To say that Paris was supposedly a filthy city, unliveable in. But when you understand where it’s coming from and how it has been orchestrated…” 

   And when Hidalgo knows that after three unsuccessful Olympic bids in eight Games – including one against London for the 2012 Games – it was she who finally scored a victory for the French capital, succeeding where every previous man had failed? That must ease the pain a little? “Absolutely!” she exults, sitting up straighter in her chair. “I am very proud of that. I mean really happy with this thumbing of the nose of history. *Vis-à-vis* my predecessors, I respect them a lot,” she adds, “and they fought, they did a lot of things – but they didn’t win.”

   We meet in the mayor’s office in the glorious 19th-century Hôtel de Ville: an office that is famously larger than the president’s at the Elysée, in a building twice the size of the White House, with spectacular views of the Seine.

   **Continue reading the full interview below ⬇️**

   [https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2024/06/08/paris-mayor-anne-hidalgo-olympics-2024-france/](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2024/06/08/paris-mayor-anne-hidalgo-olympics-2024-france/)

2. Unless we are talking about homeless people, we will hide them all!!!

3. Even as a male, i have found these claims about ‘ women being more emotional’ ridiculous. Men often have a bigger ego that can lead to irrational decisions just the same.

4. “This is the first point to be made: and the first action to be taken is to pull ourselves together. If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb – when it comes – find us doing sensible and human things—praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts—not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. They may break our bodies (a microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds.”

   CS Lewis

5. 🤡🤡🤡

6. I don’t see how it’s not going to happen

7. Gotta love those politicians making bold and inspiring statements from the safety and comfort of their ivory towers.