Three years ago, sitting in front of a few journalists, Anne Hidalgo praised her first deputy, who watched over Paris town hall while she ran her presidential campaign. Emmanuel Grégoire, she assured, “has the skills to become mayor”. A Paris, “the right is in an impasse, good for him”, the socialist candidate again congratulated herself. In 2020, she had also asked this lieutenant to abandon the town hall of the 12th arrondissement to better prepare to succeed him. It was forever ago. In an interview with Monde published this Tuesday, November 26, in which she confirms that she will not be a candidate for a third term, Anne Hidalgo announces that she will ultimately support the socialist senator Rémi Feraud. “I’m getting ready,” had already put forward the discreet president of the Paris group in common to the Council of Paris, judged by many to be too discreet to be a credible hypothesis.
“She brought Grégoire up only to end up letting him go and putting Rémi in post too late, no one knows him, regrets a major socialist elected official in another region, who is nevertheless not one of his detractors. She divides her camp and weakens. Because the militants of the Paris federation, who want to win, could disavow it by choosing Grégoire. She can also pay for being too unfair to him. She misses her outing, it’s sad for her.”
An internal clash is therefore looming within the capital's PS federation. Because Emmanuel Grégoire is not decided to give up. A declared candidate for the next municipal elections, the one who became a deputy for Paris walks the cafes to meet Parisians. Aware that he could no longer count on the support of Anne Hidalgo, he moved forward on his own, and is now requesting an internal appointment as quickly as possible. “I don't want to be prisoner of an agenda that I don't control, he explained recently. We can't spend the next nine months discussing our navel. We need to campaign and stop talking to ourselves. I don’t just want to win the vote of the Paris federation, I want to win Paris.” The Paris federation, led by Lamia El Aaraje, close to Hidalgo and once cited as a potential heir, will therefore have to decide between the two socialists, who have been working alongside each other for twenty years.
“Jadot? Gregory? Nothing worries me”
While building his independent candidacy, the deputy from Paris still wonders about this war that he did not want. With Anne Hidalgo, “we had a very intense interpersonal relationship, always in harmony, even if it could have been rough”, he says in private. Together, he recalls, they faced the yellow vest crisis and the Covid. His loyalty in these difficult times “absolves me from the treason trial”, he believes.
Everything went downhill after the 2022 presidential election. Marked by a difficult campaign and a disastrous result, Hidalgo returned to Paris town hall. There she finds an assistant who, she judges, does not understand the adversity she had to face. “It created an emotional distance,” analyzes someone close to Grégoire. The socialist has not forgiven Olivier Faure for what she considers to be a lack of support. She can no longer support this first secretary of the PS whom she considers too weak in the face of rebels, disloyal to her own people.
At the socialist congress in Marseille, in December 2023, she therefore engages in the battle to make him lose and brings her Parisian lieutenants in her wake. But Grégoire, she judges, does not comply with the necessary discipline. While supporting the same movement as the mayor, he avoids entering into the confrontation too head-on. During “Tahiti gate”, a controversy surrounding a trip by the mayor to the Pacific in the fall of 2023, she still considers that he does not defend her enough in the face of press investigations and attacks from the opposition .
“It’s the queen, they are all terrified”
While ties were weakening, the mayor of Paris could not bear to see her deputy advance in the succession without her approval. “Jadot? Gregory? Nothing worries me. I haven't decided for 2026. I'm the master of the clocks. she warned in January. “I just think she got tired of me,” evades Grégoire in private. Anne Hidalgo is like this: we are with her and behind her, or against her. Over time, the list of his enemies grew. “Anne is driven by revenge and no one stands up to her, analyzes a former close friend. There is a cult around her, maintained by her entourage of courtiers. She's the queen. They are all terrified.”
Some think that this hardness began to develop when she herself was Bertrand Delanoë's deputy and a candidate for his succession. Discredited, reduced to the rank of “dauphine”, eternal second in the mayor’s shadow, she was angry with the socialist for not letting her assert herself sooner. “The sweet Anne Hidalgo”, who stays there without making a sound, the PS leaders then mocked. “Thirteen years of learning, part of which was painful, shaped her,” affirmed his friend Jean-Louis Missika. In 2014, however, Delanoë will end up giving way to him. “Bertrand is a silent person who ended up knighting him, summarizes someone close to Grégoire. With Emmanuel, Anne did the opposite.”
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