In the wake of the global outcry over the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympic Games, socialist mayor Anne Hidalgo has responded to the detractors of the spectacle organised under her auspices—in an expletive-laden rant.
In an interview published in the French newspaper Le Monde on Tuesday, August 6th, the mayor gave a spicy response to critics of the ceremony, which she also interpreted as criticism directed against her. She denounced the “orchestration of hatred” of the capital, which she claimed had begun long before the start of the Olympic Games.
The opportunity presented itself for her to launch into an unambiguous ideological plea: “F*** the reactionaries (with the original expletive in English), f*** this extreme right, f*** all those who would like to lock us into a war of all against all,” she exclaimed—with the customary vulgarity of her public speeches.
Madame Hidalgo imagines herself to be engaged in a global war against reactionary forces and sees herself as the flagship of oppressed freedoms. Fully aware of her own worth and her supposed role as muse, she reminds us in no uncertain terms just how perfectly her august self embodies everything that the “reactionary and far-right planet” abhors:
Paris is the city of all freedoms, the city of refuge for LGBTQI+ people, the city where people live together, a city where there is a woman mayor, a left-wing mayor, a mayor of foreign origin with dual nationality, a feminist mayor and an environmentalist mayor.
She thus confirms that the capital of France, the fruit of a centuries-old heritage that transcends her, is to her nothing more than a place to express her personal fantasies. She is clearly thrilled to have Viktor Orbán and Donald Trump as her personal enemies—she, who failed to get more than 2% of the vote in her own city when she ran for president in 2022.
Her diatribe is quite in keeping with the detestable image she has been striving to project since she took over as mayor of Paris in 2014 on the basis of an electoral misunderstanding: in her first election, her right-wing opponent had a majority of votes, and Hidalgo owes her position solely to the indirect voting system specific to the city of Paris.
On the occasion of the Olympic Games, Anne Hidalgo is proving, if proof were needed, that she is one of the perfect avatars of the good conscience of certain progressive elites who take pleasure, as modern-day Leninists, in playing the role of revolutionary avant-garde to the good people lost in the past. The city of Paris is too complex for ordinary people to understand, she explains imperturbably. Fortunately, Anne Hidalgo knows what’s good for Paris.
Does she really?
Anne Hidalgo lives in a bubble. A bubble of good conscience; a bubble of ideology; a bubble of self-satisfaction. During the presidential campaign, she explained that she looked at herself in the mirror every morning, repeating to herself: “everyone loves me”—her own way of convincing herself of her worth.
But from her bubble, Anne Hidalgo refuses to see that what she calls the “reactionary and far-right planet”—which is not limited to Viktor Orbán and Donald Trump—is made up of millions of people for whom Paris is not the theme park for gay ecologists that she is trying to build. The city that arouses enthusiasm today is not that of Anne Hidalgo. It is the city of the Grand Palais with its masterly glass roof, of the Alexandre III Bridge with its flamboyant bronze candelabras. It’s the city of the Louvre, with its classical facades of finely chiselled stone. And finally, it is the city of Notre-Dame, which the whole world dreams of seeing restored to its former splendour.
Instagram does not feed on vegan canteens, recyclable toilets, and concrete cycle paths. And unfortunately for Parisians, once the hustle and bustle of the Games is over, the concrete cycle paths will still be there—and so will Anne Hidalgo.
https://europeanconservative.com/articles/commentary/anne-hidalgo-notre-dame-of-the-shame/