The race for Paris City Hall is accelerating: less than a year and a half before the municipal elections, the socialist mayor Anne Hidalgo has decided not to run for a third term and has already entrusted the succession to PS senator Rémi Féraud, triggering a war of succession within the Parisian left.
In charge of the capital since 2014, Anne Hidalgo put an end to a suspense lasting several months by announcing to the daily Le Monde published on Tuesday that she would not run for a third term in 2026, as she decided “a long time ago”.
“I have always subscribed to the idea that two mandates were sufficient to carry out profound changes,” adds the mayor, 65 years old, whose second mandate was marked by the popular success of the Olympic and Paralympic Games in the heart of the city. city last summer.
In ten years in office, the socialist has made Paris more cycle-friendly and more pedestrian, but she is strongly criticized on the debt or the development choices.
Anne Hidalgo assures that she will be “mayor until the last day, with the same energy” as when she arrived at City Hall where she succeeded the socialist Bertrand Delanoë, in March 2014, becoming the first woman to lead Paris.
She said she wanted to announce her decision “early enough” out of “respect” for Parisians and to prepare “a calm transmission” carried by the socialist senator Rémi Féraud, one of her followers.
At 53, the former mayor of the 10th arrondissement, who chairs the group of the municipal majority in the Council of Paris, “has the solidity, the seriousness and the capacity for unity necessary” to become mayor of Paris, according to Anne Hidalgo.
– No presidential election in sight –
The mayor's announcement triggers a war of succession among the socialists: a week ago, her former first deputy Emmanuel Grégoire, now a deputy, with whom she is at odds, declared himself a candidate to “ease tensions” and become “the mayor of the reconciliation of Parisians”.
Long seen as Anne Hidalgo's heir apparent, the 46-year-old PS deputy, who inflicted a scathing defeat on former minister Clément Beaune in the legislative elections, has already received the support of 450 activists from the Parisian socialist federation. This Tuesday evening he is organizing a first rally 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,” swept the ex-presidential candidate.
“Rémi has the vocation to become the next mayor of Paris. But it is not me who decides, I do not impose anything, I simply give an indication. It will be up to the Parisian socialist activists to decide,” affirms the councilor .
“The mayor's decision is a complete democratic act,” reacted on BFM radio her deputy for town planning and first secretary of the Parisian socialist party, Lamia El Aaraje.
Anne Hidalgo “wishes” for her part that ecologists and communists rally behind the candidacy of her runner-up “from the first round of municipal elections”, but rules out any alliance with La France insoumise.
Rémi Féraud explained last week to AFP that he wanted to “organize the rally straight away, with the district mayors, elected officials and activists”.
The senator places himself in a “logic of transmission, so that the history of the left in Paris begun in 2001 can continue”. “We must not change the story, we must extend it, open a new chapter in the book,” he believes.
Asked about her future projects, Anne Hidalgo clarified to Le Monde that she is “not at all a candidate” for the next presidential election, having recorded a historically low score (1.74%) in 2022.
After 2026, she wishes to “help the emergence of a social-democratic and ecological force” with the PS, but also with MEP Raphaël Glucksmann, leader of Place publique, who in her eyes could “take leadership” of this force.
“At the same time, I will continue to invest in issues of climate justice, on a national and international scale,” indicates Anne Hidalgo who, according to Le Canard Enchaîné, could take the head of the Bloomberg foundation in Brussels.
