The mayor of Paris, the socialist Anne Hidalgo, announced her candidacy for the 2022 presidential elections in France with harsh criticism of the current president, Emmanuel Macron, whom he accused of “dividing as never before” the people. Hidalgo launched this Sunday into the race for the presidency with the promise of rebuild equal opportunities that has allowed her to be what she is, but with very limited perspectives in a setting of a diminished and fragmented left.
“I have humbly decided to be a candidate for the presidency of the Republic”Hidalgo, 62, said in a 20-minute speech at the river port of Rouen, about 135 kilometers northwest of Paris. The official, who in 2020 was reelected as mayor of the capital, said that Macron “divided as never before” the French, “aggravated” social problems and “turned his back on ecology”, so he called for an end to “arrogance and disdain” of the president.
“I come to tell you about France. About me, a French woman born in Spain, who came to our country at the age of two, who grew up in Lyon in a popular neighborhood”Hidalgo pointed out before naming his father, “a worker in the Cadiz shipyards”, his mother, a seamstress, and his grandfather, sentenced to death by a Francoist military court who transmitted to his son “love for France.” This 62-year-old Franco-Spanish, who has been in charge of the Paris City Council since 2014, said she was concerned about her adopted country because “the republican model is disintegrating and with it the protections it has built throughout our history.”
The head of the government of Paris is not the only politician of the Socialist Party (PS) who aspires to the presidential seat, since the former minister Stephane Le Foll announced the same intentions. Outside the PS, various figures from the left or center-left expressed the desire to run for president, such as Jean-Luc Mélenchon (La Francia Insoumisa), the ecologist Yannick Jadot or the communist Fabien Roussel. However, none of those candidates currently appears with the possibility of going to the second round according to the latest polls.
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