• Municipals.Anne Hidalgo, favorite for the mayor of Paris, finds a rival in Rachida Dati
  • First lap Record of abstention in French municipalities

The next mayor of Paris will be a woman. The socialist Anne Hidalgo (outgoing mayor), the conservative Rachida Dati (former Minister of Justice of President Nicolas Sarkozy) and the centrist Agnès Buzyn (former Minister of Health of President Emmanuel Macron) dispute the armchair of the Mayor of Paris on Sunday in the second round of the municipal elections .

In the first round, held on March 15, Hidalgo obtained 29.33% of the votes; Dati, 22.72%; Buzyn, 17.26%; the ecologist David Belliard, 10.79%; and Cédric Villani, dissident candidate from Macron's party, 7.88%. The second round, which should have been held on March 28, was postponed until this Sunday due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Hidalgo, who has joined environmentalists in the second round, starts as a favorite in the polls with 44% of voting intention , compared to 35% for Dati and 18% for Buzyn. Only a pact between her two adversaries, which both promised not to make, would have put the outgoing mayor on the ropes.

In 2014, Hidalgo, born in San Fernando (Cádiz) and the daughter of Spanish immigrants, won the elections with 53.3% of the votes and succeeded Bertrand Delanoë, who was mayor between 2001 and 2014, in office. -Spanish thus became the first mayor of the capital .

His six years in office have been quite hectic: from the terrorist attacks of November 13, 2015 to the management of the coronavirus crisis, including the fire at the Notre-Dame cathedral a year ago, the demonstrations of the yellow vests and the strike on public transport.

If Hidalgo wins the elections, the Socialist Party, greatly weakened at the national level, will keep the capital. A little consolation. The mayor has made clear these days that she has no intention of running as a candidate for the presidential elections of 2022. "My ambition is Paris," said the socialist.

Dati, a candidate for mayor of Los Republicanos, is, like Hidalgo, the daughter of immigrants. Her father is Moroccan and her mother is Algerian. Since 2008, she has been the mayor of the VII district of Paris, a wealthy neighborhood of the capital. She was Sarkozy's Minister of Justice between 2007 and 2009 , becoming the first minister of Maghrebi origin to occupy that position. She was also a MEP between 2009 and 2019.

Macron's choice

The only one of the three candidates born in Paris, Buzyn is the daughter of a Holocaust survivor of Polish origin . She is a member of the La República en Marcha party, Macron's party. A doctor by profession, he was head of the Ministry of Health from May 2017 to last February.

Macron did not initially think of Buzyn for the mayoral bid for Paris. But he turned to her when the party's official candidate, Benjamin Griveaux, left the race just a month after the municipal first round after a sex tape of his was released publicly.

Buzyn's management at the head of the Ministry of Health has been widely criticized. The former minister assured that in January she already warned the French government of the looming coronavirus "tsunami" and that it advised against holding municipal elections in March. According to him, Prime Minister Édouard Philippe ignored his warnings and gave the green light to the holding of the elections. The curious thing is that Buzyn herself agreed to run for mayor of Paris after the Griveaux scandal in the middle of a pandemic.

Not only was Griveaux forced to resign, but mathematician Cédric Villani, then a LREM deputy, launched a dissident candidacy and ended up stealing votes from Macron's party in the first round.

Buzyn's candidacy has not seduced Parisians, according to polls. Macron will finally be left without Paris, the jewel in the crown that he dreamed of conquering when he named Griveaux, former government spokesman, as a candidate.

The president's big problem is that his party is new and does not have the territorial implant of traditional parties. Macron had obtained 89.6% of the votes in the capital in the second round of the 2017 presidential elections, in which he faced the far-right Marine Le Pen. But his party will not succeed in conquering Paris.

Security and cleanliness, in campaign

The campaign for the 2020 municipal elections has focused on safety, street cleaning, the pedestrianization of the center and Hidalgo's strong commitment to the bicycle as a means of transportation.

Dati and Buzyn criticize Hidalgo's management at the head of the Paris city hall. They assure that since she is mayor the capital is more insecure, it is dirtier and there are more rats. Hidalgo has promised to create a municipal police body that is not armed , while Dati and Buzyn want officers to carry weapons.

The fact that the elections are held in the midst of a pandemic and on the eve of the summer holidays can cause a very high abstention rate . In the first round, 56% of Parisians did not vote.

US-style elections

Elections in Paris are a little different than in the rest of France. It is by district, not by direct universal suffrage . The system is more like that of the presidential elections in the United States. Parisians will vote in the second round at the district level. They will elect their district mayors and councilors from Paris. The latter will be in charge of choosing, in a third round, the future mayor, who must obtain the support of at least 82 councilors of the 163 large voters in total.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

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