The die is cast. The news had been in the air for months, but now it has become official: Anne Hidalgo, mayor of Paris since 2014 and re-elected by popular acclaim in 2020, she is a candidate in the French presidential elections in spring 2022. She does so by representing her party, the Parti Socialiste, despite the fact that the latter has not been sailing in good waters for years now: when Emmanuel Macron won, in 2017, the PS recorded a historic debacle reaching just 6% of the preferences, with the candidate Benoit Hamon who just recently announced his withdrawal from political life and, perhaps not surprisingly, specified that he will play no role in the next election campaign. The problem for Hidalgo, a 60-year-old of Andalusian origin (the family chose France to escape Francoism), however, is that the polls - for now virtual as they were carried out before the official candidacy - don't give her much more credit than that collected by his predecessor: we are talking about no more than 9%, which certainly would not guarantee access to the ballot.
At the moment, in fact, everything seems to lead to a challenge in the second round between the outgoing president Macron (not yet officially on the field for an encore, but that will be the case) and the centre-right, with the new-found Gaullists (the Republicans, they are now called) who now seriously undermine the sovereignty of Marine Le Pen, probably worn by Macron's continued successes on the Covid front. However, the right is strong, while the left is divided as usual: once again the communist Jean-Luc Mélenchon is a candidate, who would even be preferred to the mayor of Paris, and then there are the Greens, returning from the administrative exploits of last year. And then there is always Macron himself, who is now positioned more towards the center (even if he was a minister under the Hollande presidency) but who is still able to steal the moderate vote from the centre-left, and above all enjoys a moment of discrete popularity for pandemic management and leadership at European level, after the disastrous yellow vest phase.
Hidalgo has plenty of time to recover, but she would need to organize a centre-left coalition with a single candidate (her) to have more concrete chances. Also because the mayor of Paris, who had to manage the years of the terrorist attacks, of Covid and who brought home the 2024 Olympics, however popular she is also considered very divisive: obviously the right does not like it, which on the contrary asks for immediate resignation due to incompatibility with the candidacy for the Elysée, as Jacques Chirac did not hesitate to do in 1994, but not even convincing on the left, because it is not particularly inclined to compromise. Hidalgo is in fact a pure and hard socialist, very left-oriented and intransigent on environmental issues, so much so that her best known battles are those against diesel vehicles (from 1 July in the French capital those registered before 2009 are banned) and in favor of cycle paths and public housing.
The first citizen of the Ville Lumière is also the proponent of the "quarter-hour city", an innovative urban concept that is taken up in Milan by the mayor Beppe Sala, who is linked to Hidalgo through their common commitment to the C40, the network of 40 world capitals for climate change. But if Hidalgo's prestige at an international level, also supported by the organization of the Summer Games in three years' time in the transalpine capital, at a national level the only French woman included in the Time chart on the other hand, he is still an interlocutory candidate among the 100 most influential personalities in the world. Her social-ecological commitment should have no problems in obtaining the approval of leftists and greens (who, however, already have their official candidates), but it certainly puts her in stark contrast with Macron, who has already crashed on the green turnaround, unleashing the protests of the gilets jaunes and which, however favourable, proceeds more cautiously in a reformist and pro-European direction.
Hidalgo's hope is to retrace the footsteps of fellow German Olaf Scholz, who is literally reviving the SPD (Germany's socialists) and who is seriously running for victory in the upcoming post-Merkel elections, or in any case to play a very important role in the formation of the future executive. All while up until a few weeks ago the confirmation of the Cdu, Frau Angela's party, was practically certain, in a head-to-head with the Greens who, on the other hand, seem to be in difficulty. And with the rise of the AFD extremists, which according to the latest polls seem to have been reduced. Will it be like this in France too?
