The mayor of Paris put an end to the suspense and announced that she would not be a candidate for a third term in 2026, instead supporting PS senator Rémi Féraud.
“I have always subscribed to the idea that two mandates were sufficient to carry out profound changes,” declared the mayor of Paris in an interview published this Tuesday in The World. A “decision […] taken for a long time” according to Anne Hidalgo, whose second mandate was marked by the success of the Olympic and Paralympic Games in the capital last summer.
Prepare your succession
While the municipal elections will be held in a year and a half, the socialist assures that she will be “mayor until the last day, with the same energy” as when she arrived to succeed Bertrand Delanoë in March 2014, becoming the first woman to rule the capital. The outgoing mayor says she wanted to announce her decision “early enough” out of “respect” for Parisians, but also to prepare for her succession, since she has dubbed Rémi Féraud, 53, a socialist senator and one of her great followers. Former mayor of the 10th arrondissement, he chairs the municipal majority group on the Paris Council, and “has the solidity, seriousness and ability to unite necessary” to occupy the position, according to the mayor.
Organize the gathering
This announcement comes a week after her former first deputy Emmanuel Grégoire, with whom she is at odds, announced her candidacy. He declared himself a candidate to “ease tensions” and become “the mayor of the reconciliation of Parisians”. The PS deputy has already received the support of 450 activists from the Parisian socialist federation and is organizing a first rally this Tuesday evening around his candidacy. “Emmanuel Grégoire has chosen to go to the National Assembly to take up the fight against the extreme right: there will probably be a dissolution by the end of 2025. We cannot be a candidate for everything,” declared the ex-presidential candidate, who obtained the score of 1.74% in 2022. She assured not to run again in 2027.
Anne Hidalgo “gives an indication” as to the choice of Rémi Féraud as mayor of Paris, and “wishes” that environmentalists and communists rally behind him, excluding however an alliance with La France Insoumise. Last week, Rémi Féraud explained to AFP that he wanted to “organize the rally straight away, with the district mayors, elected officials and activists”. “We must not change the story, we must extend it, open a new chapter of the book […] in a logic of transmission, so that the history of the left in Paris begun in 2001 can continue,” he believes.
Asked about her future projects, the outgoing mayor wishes to “help the emergence of a social-democratic and environmentalist force” with the PS and MEP Raphaël Glucksmann, as well as to invest “in issues of climate justice, nationally and internationally. According to Le Canard Enchaîné, she could take the helm of the Bloomberg foundation in Brussels.
