2023-11-06 07:15:11
The mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, during one of her last public appearances in the capital before her trips to Benin then Polynesia, October 6, 2023. MIGUEL MEDINA / AFP
On October 15, when Anne Hidalgo took off for Tokyo, where she made a stopover of a few hours before reaching New Caledonia, she knew that this long-term exotic trip presented a major political risk. It is a three-week trip: first an official part which includes three days on site in Noumea, a day of transfer via Auckland (New Zealand) and a day in Tahiti; then, a fifteen-day private vacation in a Polynesian island.
The symbol of such a long and distant journey could, at the very least, be misinterpreted: a week earlier, on October 7, Hamas attacked Israel; On October 13, a French teacher, Dominique Bernard, was assassinated in Arras.
Within the mayor’s close team, we are asking ourselves the question of the appropriateness of a prolonged absence in such a tragic and explosive context. But we decide not to cancel a long-planned trip.
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We prefer, on the other hand, not to “publicize” these days in the tropics. Giving the impression of not fully accepting being 16,732 kilometers from her city, Anne Hidalgo will not post on her Instagram and X (formerly Twitter) accounts any photos of her visit there. Instead, she publishes messages which suggest that she is still present in the capital. For example, a video published on Instagram on October 19 shows her cycling on the banks of the Seine with this comment: “When the sun’s rays return, in Paris we savor them by bike”. Except that that day, she was in… Nouméa.
A communication that is all the more opaque, even misleading, as Anne Hidalgo’s official agenda is never made public. A delegation of six people accompanies the Parisian councilor: his chief of staff, Frédéric Lénica, his chief of staff, Milton Guilherme, his deputy in charge of sports and the Olympic and Paralympic Games (JOP), Pierre Rabadan, his deputy for overseas, Jacques Martial, as well as his general delegate for overseas, Pierre Thomas.
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A trip that Anne Hidalgo would have liked to be discreet
On October 25, The Chained duck echoes this trip, so far unnoticed, which would have forced the mayor to skip an interministerial committee of October 20 to validate the traffic plan in Paris for the Olympic period, according to comments attributed to the prefect of police of Paris, Laurent Nuñez. The satirical weekly suggests that the main object of its trip is the visit infrastructure for the Paris JOP surfing event in 2024 – it will be held in Tahiti. According to our information, Anne Hidalgo was never officially invited to the interministerial committee from which she could not therefore be absent, but regardless, the fuse of the controversy is lit.
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