Anne Hidalgo, the mayor of Paris, was being interviewed by Le Monde when she launched her tirade. Photo / Getty Images
Anne Hidalgo, the mayor of Paris, was being interviewed by Le Monde when she launched her tirade. Photo / Getty Images
Anne Hidalgo’s expletive-laden outburst is directed at ‘extreme Right’ and ‘reactionaries’ who ‘hate’ the French capital.
Paris’s embattled Socialist mayor told her many critics to “f***” off on Thursday in an apparent rush of blood to the head after the success of the Olympics.
Delivering the offensive phrase inEnglish in a highly undiplomatic outburst during an interview with Le Monde, Anne Hidalgo said: “F*** reactionaries, f*** the extreme Right, f*** all those who want to shut us in a war of everyone against everyone.”
The newspaper reported that Hidalgo’s press officer was appalled at the expletive-laden tirade but that the mayor carried on regardless, apparently carried away by the gushing domestic and international praise for the Games.
“When there is a shared feeling of fraternity, sorority, of humanism … we Parisians, we French people, are proud,” she said.
Hidalgo, 65, who, in 2014, was the first woman to become Paris mayor and was re-elected in 2020, is a divisive figure who has come under frequent fire for her drive to cut traffic and extend green spaces.
Critics say her penchant for ugly urban architecture has defaced the City of Lights and that the capital has become grimy and rat-infested.
She suffered national humiliation when she ran as the Socialist party candidate for the Elysée two years later and obtained a paltry 1.7% of the vote.
She also infuriated Tony Estanguet, the Paris Olympic committee chief, earlier this year by warning that work on the capital’s public transport system would not be ready in time for the Games – an attitude he slammed as defeatist.
Parisian residents fled the capital
However, all such criticism vanished as the French and the rest of the world warmed to the Games, widely dubbed a resounding success even if almost half of Parisian residents fled the capital before it started.
Some of those who remained even thanked her during a walkabout on the banks of the Seine this week. Last month, nine days before the Games opened, she had plunged into the river to prove the water was clean enough for swimming events.
Hidalgo plunged into the River Seine before the Olympics to prove the water was safe for swimming events. Photo / Getty Images
‘Contested, mocked, caricatured’
“Our vision … has been contradicted, contested, mocked, caricatured,” she said. “It is a great pleasure to see the city the way we had planned it and to hear people thank us.”
In her interview, Hidalgo claimed that she had been the victim of a campaign by a “reactionary and extreme-Right planet” which harboured “hatred” for Paris because it was the city “of all freedoms, the refuge for LGBTQI+ … a city that has a Left-wing woman mayor, and what is more of foreign origin and with dual nationality and an ecologist and feminist to boot”.
Despite her unpopularity, the mayor, who was born in Spain and has dual nationality, appeared to suggest the Olympics could set her in stead for a third term in 2026, telling doubters claims that “she’s dead, she’s finished, she’s over” were premature.
While Hidalgo and Emmanuel Macron, the French president, have frequently traded barbs, both are reportedly in agreement that the Olympic cauldron that rises every night under a helium-filled balloon in the Tuileries gardens by the Louvre should become a permanent fixture.
Hidalgo is also canvassing to erect statues of the women celebrated in the opening ceremony, including Olympe de Gouges, a pioneering feminist and playwright who was killed in 1793 during the Revolution.
