For Anne Hidalgo, a Paris Council that looks like an end-of-term report

Like an air of assessment of the term of office. The Paris Council, which begins Tuesday, November 19, promises to be the final great political moment of Anne Hidalgo's second – and possibly last – mandate. A little less than a year and a half before the municipal elections for which the socialist deputy of Paris Emmanuel Grégoire, former first deputy of Anne Hidalgo, has just declared himself a candidate, it is an opportunity for the Parisian executive to mark the main axes of its policy pursued for ten years by giving them overall coherence orchestrated around four strategic plans. Synthesize the general political narrative before the electoral race for 2026 begins, facing an opposition ready on the starting line, determined not to make any concessions.

The color given by the majority to the projects submitted to the vote this week has never been so green. The climate plan, the local bioclimatic urban planning plan, the environmental health plan and the resilience plan are all interconnected and focused around the same issue: succeeding in making Paris a city that remains habitable in a climate crisis which has already started.

In the climate plan, planned for the period 2024-2030, this translates into a set of 500 medium and long-term measures, which outline the capital's fight against climate change. Reduction of the carbon footprint and energy consumption, development of renewables, revegetation, refreshing of public spaces, thermal renovation of buildings, priority for cycling over cars, preservation and valorization of water resources… the subjects are as diverse as numerous, too many, even, for the Les Républicains group, which sees it as a “Prévert inventory” et “lots of empty promises”, when Changing Paris (the group of Rachida Dati, the mayor of 7^e district) denounces a “catch-all document aligning promises without guarantees of achievement”.

“Directist vision”

Create 300 hectares of green spaces? Impossible, believes the vice-president of the Changer Paris group, David Alphand, who calculated that this was equivalent to “420 football fields” and does not see how to achieve this unless it includes Parisian cemeteries. It is also in this plan that we find the establishment of the limited traffic zone in the center of Paris, the lowering of the speed on the ring road to 50 km/h or the increase in the parking rate. for heavy vehicles, all measures vigorously denounced by the opposition.

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