Three women for the hôtel de ville - Les municipales in Paris
The city of Paris has only had its own elected mayor since 1977. Although the office existed from 1789 until 1794 (when it was liquidated at the same time as the Terror), again briefly under the Second Republic in 1848 and again under the Third Republic from September 1870 until March 1871, the office holder was appointed. Paris had a city hall, of course. In the 19th century, three regimes - the Orléans monarchy in 1830 and the Second and Third Republics - were formally declared to cheering crowds thronging in front of the hôtel de ville. But the story of the building, best known perhaps as the backdrop for Doisneau’s lovers grabbing a sneaky snog, is for another time and place.
For over a century there was a city council with a chair, but no mayor. It wasn’t until Valéry Giscard d’Estaing was elected President of the Republic in the spring of 1974 and as part of his volley of measures to ‘liberalise’ political life, that any French government felt relaxed enough to grant Paris a mayor of its own. And it wasn’t until 1982, under the Socialist François Mitterrand that Paris, (along with Lyon and Marseille under la loi PLM), was endowed anew with elected mayors for each of its arrondissements or districts.
Giscard planned for Paris to become the focal point of a realignment of the French right, with his candidate, Michel d’Ornano installed in city hall. Giscard, on the non-Gaullist moderate right of French politics had owed his victory in 1974, in part at least, to disarray among the Gaullists, where Jacques Chirac was emerging as the man to watch. Giscard, mindful of the need perhaps to keep your enemies closer than your friends, had made Chirac PM, but when the President refused his Prime Minister’s request to dissolve the National Assembly and hold fresh general elections in 1976, Chirac resigned.
The rest is history. With the help of his close advisors, Marie-France Garaud, Pierre Juillet and Charles Pasqua, Chirac revived the Gaullist movement as the Rassemblement pour la République (Assembly for the Republic/RPR). Garaud and Juillet then persuaded an allegedly luke-warm Chirac to run for the new post of mayor of Paris. His list won a majority of seats on the city council and his election become a formality.
Figure 1 - France-Soir, Paris’s evening newspaper, reports Chirac’s election in 1977.
Whatever his initial misgivings, Chirac would make Paris the showcase for his very obvious desire to be President. It took three goes - 1981, 1988 and then finally 1995 - to get into the Elysée. But Paris became his fiefdom, along with his seat in the National Assembly for the Corrèze, a seat he abandoned only briefly when he was PM under Mitterrand from 1986 to 1988.
Figure 2 - Paris in 1977. The dark blue shows arrondissements taken by Chirac’s RPR, the lighter shades of blue those taken by Giscardians. In 1977, the French left was going through its own political trauma and these elections would represent the last time the PCF held any power in Paris intra muros.
Chirac’s 1981 attempt on the Elysée was less about winning and more about making Giscard uncomfortable. And it worked. The Socialist François Mitterrand won. Two years later, at the 1983 municipal elections and despite the PLM law that was meant to derail his juggernaut, Chirac pulled off the grand chelem (yes, that is the French for grand slam) of winning all 20 mairies d’arrondissement. This made him the single most important figure on the right ahead of the 1988 presidential election, but a botched period as PM from 1986 and a poor campaign in 1988, which saw Mitterrand re-elected, convinced many on the right that his time was over. Paris saved him in 1989, when he again swept the board. It wasn’t all plain sailing on the way to the Elysée in 1995, but the hôtel de ville helped give Chirac an edge over his right-wing rival Edouard Balladur in that contest.
Since 1995, there have been three mayors. Chirac chose as his successor Jean Tiberi, but although he won the 1995 contest quite comfortably, the left had begun to regain its traditional strongholds in the north-eastern arrondissements and in its tête de liste Bertrand Delanoë, a PS senator for the département of Paris (yes, it’s a city and a department), had a serious contender.
Divisions on the right, plus the emergence of the Greens as a political force in the city (especially in the second arrondissement), saw Delanoë elected in 2001. In 2008 (the elections were put back a year to avoid the log-jam caused by presidential and general elections in the spring and summer of 2007), Delanoë was part of the left-wing triumph nationwide, as the French reacted against the first year of the Sarkozy-Fillon administration.
From 2001 to 2014, Delanoë’s première-adjointe, or ‘first assistant mayor’ was Anne Hidalgo. In 2014 she took over as the PS tête de liste and despite the general unpopularity of Socialist President François Hollande and municipal elections that were bad nationally for the party, Hidalgo did not even need a formal alliance with the Greens to see off the challenge of former Sakozy minister Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet, although she chose to govern Paris with them. [There are a series of perfectly serviceable and reliable accounts of the municipal elections in Paris since 1977 on Wikipedia that can be followed in sequence.] Despite a run at the right-wing primary in late 2016, her defeat in 2014 really marked the graveyard of NKM’s presidential ambitions.
Figure 3, below, shows the political balance in the arrondissements over the last four elections. From 2001, the balance is steady and reflects the classic reading of Paris as a city with a clear east-west, left-right divide. This even goes as far as sites of memory, but we’ll think about that another time. The maps also make it look like Paris is delicately balanced. But in fact, the election of the mayor depends of the 163 members of the municipal coucil. Members of the city assembly are delegated from within each district council. The number of arrondissement councillors depends on the size of the population of the district, though each has a minimum of ten. The eastern arrondissements are, generally, the more populous, with the exception of the 15th, in the south-west of the city. As a consequence, the left controls city hall.
Figure 3 - the balance of the arrondissements 1995-2014
Figure 4, below, shows the number of seats on the city council for each arrondissement and the list in the lead after the first round in 2020. The slightly different shape of the city is due to the inclusion of the Bois de Boulogne to the west and Bois de Vincennes in the east in the source map. Also, for the first time in 2020, the first, second, third, and fourth arrondissements have been amalgamated into a single unit, electing 16 conseillers d’arrondissement, eight of whom will sit on the city assembly.
Figure 4 - The number of city councillors by arrondissment.
Hidalgo’s opponents had reason to hope that she would not be able to hold onto the capital in 2020 for a number of reasons.
The first was the astonishing collapse of the PS during and since the Hollande presidency, but as we have already noted in previous blog entries, the PS and the right-wing LR have held up better so far in the first round of these local elections.
The second was that, in the first round of the 2017 presidential election, Paris was largely split between Emmanuel Macron and François Fillon, with Jean-Luc Mélenchon taking votes in the traditional left-wing periphery. In the second round, the capital overhelmingly voted for Macron. The far-right has made virtually no inroads into the city of Paris. In the general election, Paris voted Macron. Then, in 2019’s European elections, the former Fillon vote turned out not for Les Républicains, but principally for Macron’s LREM. It’s important to note that, while Paris was the battleground of the gilet jaunes, the movement was not generally supported within the city, or at least this did not translate into votes for the opposition in 2019. Hopes, however, of a vague jaune, ironically the colour generally used to indicate LREM, come the municipal elections had more or less evaporated by the autumn of 2019.
La République en Marche was riven with divisions over the choice of a candidate to lead their list. At one point the name of PM Edouard Philippe was mooted, but that would have been absurd. Standing for Le Havre is one thing, Paris is another. Eventually they opted for Benjamin Griveaux, who had rallied to Macron from the PS and served as a junior finance minister, then goverment spokesman, but the choice, made by Macron, was rejected by the charismatic LREM deputy Cédric Villani, whose dissident list would take just under 8% of the vote city-wide on 15 March 2020. At one point in January it looked as if Griveaux might take as much as 29%, but he still lagged behind Hidalgo and the LR candidate, Rachida Dati. And then news broke that the ‘happily married’ Griveaux had been sending and receiving erotic texts and photos from a woman who was not his wife and that was that. In the midst of the story breaking, Macron reached for the health minister Agnès Buzyn. Briefly, LREM’s poll scores appeared to rally, but Buzyn managed just 17% across the city, while Dati had 23% and Hidalgo 29%.
In some ways the collapse of the PS had helped Hidalgo. Who else was there? Despite her alleged unpopularity with Parisians frustrated with her moves to restrict the movement of traffic around the city - amongst others, in fact her poll rating remained strong enough to see her being one of the two main protagonists in the second round in any of the pollsters prognoses. And only she could hope to harvest the support of the Ecologists, who eventually took 10.8% of the vote. In the long break between the two rounds, Covid-19 oblige, Hidalgo and the Ecologist leader David Belliard were able to strike a deal for governing the city.
While the PS was in no state to oppose Hidalgo running for re-election, any reservations Les Républicains might have had about former justice minister Dati leading their list were undermined by their own lack of any serious, high profile alternative. The crushing defeat of the Wauquiez-Bellamy list in the European election meant the party swung back to the old(ish) guard, but while Dati is a controversial figure, her refusal to back down and threat to stand even if she did not get official party backing saw her formally invested in November 2019. This wasn’t to everyone’s liking. In the 15th arrondissment, the outgoing LR mayor Philippe Goujon led a dissident list that took 21% of the vote behind Dati’s candidate Agnès Evren (22%). Dati had the personal satisfaction of heading the only list to take one of the districts in the first round - the 7th - with 50.7% of the vote, and even her critics accept that she has taken enormous strides to revive the right in Paris.
Figure 5 - The leading lists after the first round. Hidalgo is pink, Buzyn yellow, Dati blue. Dati won the 7th outright in the first round.
As things stand, on 21 June 2020 and a week before the second round of voting, Hidalgo is credited with 44/45% of voting intentions, Dati with 33% and Buzyn a shade under 20%. But these are city-wide figures and it is still not clear how they will map onto seats on the city council and whether LREM councillors could hold the balance between Hidalgo and Dati. If they were to vote for Dati, that would tell us a great deal about the droitisation of La République en Marche.
I began this article by discussing how Jacques Chirac used Paris city hall as the base for his attempts on the presidency. Might Hidalgo be the PS candidate for 2022?
Figure 6 - Dati, Hidalgo and Buzyn prepare to go head-to-head in the first of two televised debates on 17 June 2020