Bricklayer’s daughter with Paris in her sights
The conservative candidate for mayor of Paris has become the surprise favourite to clinch the first round of elections next Sunday in an all-female fight for the French capital. Rachida Dati, 54, a Moroccan bricklayer’s daughter who swept to fame as Nicolas Sarkozy’s justice minister, insisted that a victory in the run-off against incumbent Socialist Anne Hidalgo would herald the renaissance of France’s ailing Right following three years in the doldrums.
Paris is just one of 36,000-plus cities, towns and villages around France holding the first round of municipal elections, with the run-off due on March 22.
After years in relative anonymity as an MEP and mayor of Paris’ affluent seventh arrondissement, Ms Dati has stunned her own party, The Republicans, or LR, with a pugnacious campaign to end two decades of Left-wing rule in Paris on a ticket to fight crime and dirt and help families in the City of Light.
“The Right still exists in France,” she told The Sunday Telegraph. “It’s simply that at one stage, the conservative political establishment turned its back on the popular classes. If you return to your values and fundamentals, voters will respond.”
She detailed her plan to raise the number of video surveillance cameras in Paris to 4,000 – a tiny figure compared with the estimated more than 600,000 dotting London.
Asked whether she took inspiration from Boris Johnson, the UK capital’s former mayor, she chose to launch an apparent attack on Sadiq Kahn, his Labour successor, saying: “I will only say that over the past two or three years, crime has exploded in London. When you talk to people over there, they say it is an issue of a lack of police numbers.”
She added: “We need more police in the streets but also behind the cameras. It’s all very well having lots of them, but if you don’t have people behind them they serve no purpose.”
Ms Dati, who when a minister posed in high heels and fishnet stockings for Paris Match, was at one stage more in the spotlight over her private life than political career. Her return to work days after the birth of her daughter, whose father she declined to name, sparked intense speculation.
False rumours that it was Mr Sarkozy ended when she won a paternity claim against a friend of his.
But her punchy performance has turned her into a poster girl for LR, which was floored by Emmanuel Macron’s shock victory in 2017 in presidential then legislative elections which captured much of its electorate.
The party went into meltdown after presidential candidate François Fillon, once a runaway favourite, was accused of embezzling taxpayers’ money to pay his Welsh-born wife Penelope almost a million euros for a fake job as his assistant. The pair are currently on trial in Paris.
Since then the Right has limped on with no real leader but its biggest heavyweights have thrown their weight behind Ms Dati and Mr Sarkozy will give her his official blessing at a rally in Paris tomorrow night.
“People who want change should vote Dati,” said Xavier Bertrand, president of the northern Hauts-deFrance region and a potential presidential contender for 2022. He hailed the fact that she did not come from “a prefabricated political mould”.
In a television debate this week, Ms Dati laid into her Socialist rival’s record, saying Ms Hidalgo’s grand plans to oust the automobile and pedestrianise the banks of the Seine had led to “anarchy everywhere”.
“I have to hold my breath when I go jogging along the banks of the Seine, which have become open-air latrines,” she fumed.
“Anne Hidalgo has pitted Parisians against each other. The public space has become a battleground between bikes and cars, pedestrians and electric scooters. Anne Hidalgo’s Paris is one where nothing is in common anymore.”
Ms Hidalgo is on the back foot with a majority of Parisians, some 54 per cent, disapproving of her tenure, according to the latest poll, mainly due to her record on keeping the capital clean and crime-free.
Meanwhile, Mr Macron’s camp is scrambling to recover from the shock withdrawal of Benjamin Griveaux, its official candidate, who was felled over the release of a sex tape the married man had sent to a lover. His replacement, ex-health minister Agnès Buzyn, is struggling to catch the two front-runners.
Several polls suggest that Ms Dati could inch ahead in round one, taking 25 per cent of the vote compared with Ms Hidalgo’s 24 per cent, with Ms Buzyn on 17 per cent. However, she faces an arduous task in round two of the complex ballot, which is all about winning individual arrondissements and forging alliances with groups that take more than 10 per cent of the vote.
If Ms Hidalgo teams up with the Greens as predicted, she is polling to leapfrog Ms Dati in round two with 37 per cent of the vote compared with the Right-winger’s 33.5 per cent. Ms Buzyn is polling to finish third even if she joins forces with Cédric Villani, the maverick ex-Macronist.
Mathieu Gallard of pollster Ipsos said: “There is unquestionably a real dynamic because even two or three months ago Dati was on 12 or 13 per cent but on round two she has no true allies.”
He pointed out that in the last Paris mayoral elections, Right-winger Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet romped home in round one with almost 36 per cent, only to crash out in the run-off for similar reasons.
Despite the unfavourable odds, Ms
‘The Right still exists in France. It’s simply that at one stage, it turned its back on the popular classes. If you return to your values, voters will respond’
Dati confidently predicted “we are going to win” at a whirlwind visit to The Refuge, a Parisian shelter for LGBT youths who have suffered abuse or discrimination.
Dressed in black from head to toe with flashes of gold jewellery, she told the youths that they would be safer from discrimination once she had armed municipal police officers in Paris and boosted their numbers by 500 to 3,400.
In Paris, as elsewhere in France, municipal elections are fought largely on local issues but there will be national implications.
Lacking any grassroots political base, Mr Macron’s fledgling LREM party could end up failing to win any towns with over 100,000 inhabitants, as candidates are taken to task over the president’s pension reform, which sparked months of strikes.
Despite their collapse in national elections, France’s once-mighty Socialist and Republicans party could win big cities from Bordeaux to Lille.
But the real surprise could come from a Green surge, with Bordeaux, Rouen, Besançon and even Lyon within reach.
“That would really increase the Greens’ credibility before the presidential elections and could even shake up the predicted duel between Mr Macron and Marine Le Pen,” said Mr Gallard.
The far-Right leader’s National Rally is pinning its hopes on one major scalp: Perpignan in southwestern France, where Louis Aliot, the party’s number two, is in pole position.