Quote:
Originally Posted by lio45
Does the clear anti-incumbent trend we see nowadays in Quebec, Canada, Britain, the USA and France apply to Paris municipal politics too? I'd guess it does...?
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Unfortunately the situation in Paris in hopeless, because unlike all other Western metropolises Paris has not been merged with its suburbs. So it's as if NYC was still limited to Manhattan. Only the people rich enough or poor enough to live inside the 1860 borders of the City of Paris can vote for the mayor of Paris, which results in an electorate that is completely fucked up from a social point of view, with either the very rich voting for the right, or the poor and bobo types (such as those French guys in Montréal) voting for the left (considered "left" here, but which would be considered "far-left" in North America).
To add to this problem, since 1982 the municipal elections in Paris have been run in the same way as US presidential elections. We do not elect the mayor of Paris, much as Americans do not elect the president. We elect "electors" (called "conseillers de Paris" here) in each arrondissement. Each arrondissement sends its "electors" to the city council, where they elect the mayor, much as each US state sends electors to the electoral college who then elect the president.
As a result, much as in the US, it doesn't matter who wins the most votes city-wide. What matters are the swing-arrondissements. Due to the fucked up social makeup of the City of Paris's electorate, western arrondissements are predominantly bourgeois and always send right-wing councilors to the city council, whereas eastern arrondissements are predominantly inhabited by bobo types and ethnic minorities living in social housing who always send left-wing councilors to the city council.
If you're a left-wing voter in the western arrondissements, your vote counts for nothing, just like being a Democrat in Texas. If you're a right-wing voter in the Eastern arrondissements, your vote counts for nothing, just like being a Republican in California.
In practice, only 2 swing-arrondissements get to decide the mayor of Paris: the 12th and the 14th arrondissements, where left-wing and right-wing forces used to be balanced, with both bourgeois and bobo/subsidized populations, but in the past 23 years of the left in power, they have built lots of social housing in these two arrondissements, and bobo types have now become almost single-issue voters (bicycles, bicycles, bicycles!!), so it's almost impossible for the right-wing opposition to win these two swing-arrondissements nowadays, and therefore topple Anne Hidalgo and her majority.
The Macron deputies in the National Assembly had FINALLY understood that (after spectacularly crashing in the 2020 municipal election), and they planned to reform the voting law and make the municipal election in Paris similar to the rest of France, i.e. one man one vote, no more "electoral college" and all that nonsense. Anne Hidalgo was quite afraid of that change, as she would suddenly have had to try and woo the Western arrondissements (which she can happily ignore in the current system), but the president decided to disband the National Assembly, and the rest is history as they say... All bills examined in the Parliament have become moot, including the one reforming the voting law in Paris, and there won't be any majority in the new National Assembly to vote such a law.
There will also not be any majority in Parliament to merge the city with its suburbs (to elect a mayor of Greater Paris, which would rebalance the election, as suburban voters are more middle-class). So Anne Hidalgo is almost assured of being reelected (either her, or the female successor that she's currently grooming to succeed her).
One hope I had was that a far-right government would disband the Paris city council and establish direct authority by the French State over the city (as existed before 1977), a threat that Macron sometimes made but never had the guts to implement, as a typical wishy-washy centrist that he is, but with last night's election results there won't be a far-right government in France, so no "tutelle de l'Etat" as it's called in French, since there will probably be no majority in the new National Assembly to trigger such a "tutelle".
We're stuck. More and more Parisians are fleeing the city and moving to the suburbs. The City of Paris is currently losing inhabitants (and classrooms in city schools) at a record rate.
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