Paris mayor race keys on trees, filth

PARIS — Parisians have been dished up a sex video scandal that triggered the surprise withdrawal of the candidate for President Emmanuel Macron’s party, a last-minute replacement and mud-slinging about the filth of Paris streets.

As Sunday’s first round of municipal elections approaches, three women top the polls, including incumbent Mayor Anne Hidalgo, a socialist best known for her divisive effort to rid Paris of cars. She wants to create “mini-forests” with 170,000 newly planted trees and make the city center fully bicycle friendly.

Trees, from urban forests to planted promenades, made a late appearance on the agendas of most of the eight candidates in the Paris race of France’s municipal elections.

Seized during the French Revolution, set afire in a brutal 1871 repression, Paris City Hall, drenched in 338 statues and grander than the presidential Elysee Palace, is indeed a plum. Protocol demands that visiting heads of state visit the Paris mayor.

Rachida Dati, a conservative justice minister under former President Nicolas Sarkozy, is tasting victory. A reborn Dati, who exchanged her extravagant tastes for no-nonsense dress and an austere style, is running neck and neck with Hidalgo. Dati puts cleaning up Paris streets and securing them with armed municipal police and a plethora of video cameras as her priority.

“It’s anarchy everywhere” and “revolting filth,” she said in a debate last week when candidates threw daggers at Hidalgo.

Third in recent polls and late-comer Agnes Buzyn, a physician, was no kinder to the current mayor, saying that “we will all die” if Paris, Europe’s most densely populated capital, doesn’t cool down, a reference to the omnipresent concrete and Hidalgo’s project to build more towers.

Buzyn, a medical doctor, was plucked from her job as health minister in mid-February during the world crisis over the coronavirus to replace Macron’s candidate. Clearly pitching for votes from the conservative camp, she, too, wants armed municipal police for the capital she grew up in, along with clean streets.

Buzyn was named a candidate on Feb. 16, two days after Benjamin Griveaux pulled out of the race. Griveaux, former government spokesman, abruptly announced his departure after a graphic sex video began circulating online.

Enter the Russian performance artist, Piotr Pavlensky, who said he had posted the video, surreptitiously obtained, to denounce the “hypocrisy” of Griveaux for promoting family values in the campaign. The response across the political spectrum, including from rival mayoral candidates, was solidarity with Griveaux.