Interview: Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo

In a rare moment of winter sun, I'm waiting to enter Paris's city hall, a renaissance-style hulk modelled after the great chateaux of the Loire Valley. But getting into the Hotel de Ville is taking longer than normal: everywhere in Paris there are more guards, police and soldiers on patrol. The mayor's office is no exception.

Since Islamist extremists went on a murderous rampage in January, gunning down staff at the offices of satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, shooting three police officers and killing hostages in a kosher supermarket, Anne Hidalgo, the city's first female leader, has been exceptionally busy.

Hidalgo was elected mayor almost a year ago, and her brief was already challenging. But the attacks have suddenly pushed her to the front lines of France's fight against terrorism. She feels pressure, she says, to ensure Parisians' security but also to answer deeper questions around community. Elegantly dressed, Hidalgo speaks softly and listens carefully, unusually so for a politician.

"There are lots of people who already have great projects," she says. In the weeks since the attacks, Hidalgo has said that she is going to experiment with an idea to open schools and community centres during the weekends - in part to provide a venue for adults willing to dedicate some free time to helping schoolchildren with their homework, but also to bring people together by showing films and organising conferences along the theme of integration.

Celebrities such as singer and actor Marc Lavoine and Lilian Thuram, France's most capped football player for the national team, have come to her with ideas that she believes her government can support. "I can help connect them with those in need, and provide the space in which to work."

If Hidalgo has one of the biggest jobs in French politics, she has an office to match - 155 square metres of it, the largest of any public employee in France. In one corner, there is a large, graffiti-inspired canvas propped up against the wood-panelled wall. Robert Doisneau's "The Kiss by the Hotel de Ville", his most celebrated photograph of a couple embracing, rests on an easel. It may be a touch sentimental but the context is at least fitting.

There is a huge marble fireplace with three foot-high Eiffel Towers on the mantelpiece. There is also a sofa, chairs, an office desk and another long glass-topped table surrounded by wooden chairs. It is well furnished for the long hours Hidalgo spends here. Married with a 13-year-old son, and two grown-up children from a former partner, she admits that the job is a heavy commitment. "It is not always easy for [the family] but I have never suffered from guilt. To be mayor is to work 24 hours a day."

About 18 months ago, Hidalgo held one of her first campaign rallies in Paris's hip Bataclan nightclub, to the beat of the Rolling Stones singing "Harlem Shuffle". Back then, she was slugging it out with another woman determined to fill one of the highest-profile jobs in French politics: Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet, the centre-right candidate whose aristocratic roots and talent for the classical harp ultimately proved too stuffy for Parisian voters. Hidalgo, who is a staunch member of the Socialist party, won about 55 per cent of the vote in a second-round, head-to-head run-off. But the fact that she got to the capital of Europe's second-largest economy at all, let alone won an election to lead it, didn't always seem probable.

Born in Spain in 1959, Hidalgo spent her first years not as Anne, but as Ana, and lived in San Fernando, near Cadiz. On her personal web page, she describes the port as "a city on the ocean where east meets west" and where "the raw light, the salty air and the succulent shrimps touch me like Marcel Proust's madeleine".

The daughter of an electrician and a seamstress who fled Franco's Spain in the 1960s, Hidalgo grew up with her elder sister in a poor suburb of Lyon. She took to French fast, becoming a French citizen at 14. (She maintains dual nationality.) She excelled at school, studied labour law and was for a time a works inspector before entering politics.

Today, Hidalgo is more comfortable in French than in Spanish. She is also fiercely territorial: she has often said that she always dreamt of Paris; during our interview, she refers more than once to the French capital as "my city".

But though considered a synonym for modernity in the late 19th century, Paris seems to some more of a museum in the 21st. London, once a drab northern neighbour, suddenly seems wealthier, more dynamic. How does Hidalgo intend to fix this? She acknowledges that the attacks took a toll on the local economy - and precisely at a moment when retail businesses were counting on the January sales to lift revenues. "The shops were empty," she says. "It is not just that people were worried. I think they just didn't want to leave home. They wanted to talk instead, to be together and to discuss what was going on in the country."

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Hidalgo knew Charlie Hebdo's slain editor Stephane Charbonnier - "Charb" - and was close to many others at the publication. "He was an incredible person," she says of the cartoonist. "He and the others have always been part of my political education. I discovered myself in the drawings of that generation and I never thought they could die. I thought they were immortal."

. . .

Hidalgo's stated goal is to "reinvent Paris . . . there will be a radical transformation of the city," she promises. But she does not believe in extended shopping hours to encourage economic growth. She is fiercely opposed to the French government's determination to open up Sunday trading - a move that, according to a law it forced through by decree this month, will allow businesses to open on 12 Sundays a year compared with just five at present. Her resistance to the changes, proposed by members of her own Socialist party, has come as she also tries to combat a growing perception that the lack of Sunday commerce in Paris - supermarkets are closed, as are the grands magasins such as Galeries Lafayette and Printemps - makes it feel more like a sleepy provincial town than the capital of Europe's second-largest economy.

That feeling is prevalent among young Parisians. For all Paris's character and beauty, finding a job is harder than it used to be and many people admit to wanting to leave - usually to London. Some French companies are starting to think the same way: in 2013, French oil company Total said that it was planning to move its entire corporate treasury department to London. "The idea is to get closer to London, which is the oil-trading and financial centre of Europe," a company representative said at the time.

Hidalgo insists that Paris is not nearly as sleepy as some people would have you think. For one thing, she says that 25 per cent of all shops open on Sundays. "I don't accept this stereotype of the city being closed on Sundays, because it just isn't true," she says. "I don't want my city caricatured."

An opinion poll conducted by France's Ifop agency this month showed that Hidalgo was popular among 49 per cent of the French population - the same as figures in the national spotlight such as Bernard Cazeneuve, the interior minister. Jerome Fourquet of Ifop says she has avoided any serious problems since taking office. "So far, she hasn't had anything negative against her."

Even so, many people feel that Hidalgo has struggled to emerge from the shadow of the much-loved Bertrand Delanoe, her predecessor and former boss. Delanoe's overwhelming charisma made him a star among Parisians; Hidalgo's relative lack of flair means that she still has some work to achieve the same level of popularity.

Many of Hidalgo's predecessors lived on site at the Hotel de Ville but she prefers the relative privacy of her modest home in the 15th arrondissement, where she lives with Jean-Marc Germain, a Socialist member of parliament, and their son.

One prominent theme of Hidalgo's election campaign was to step up housing developments, with a programme to construct 10,000 flats a year, including 7,000 low-income residences, within Paris's ring road, one of Europe's most densely populated urban centres. She describes Paris as already "very cosmopolitan . . . There is a wide mix and many origins". And she points out that roughly 300,000 of the city's 2.3 million residents hold foreign passports - a figure that does not include people with double nationalities such as herself. But she says that more needs to be done.

That belief tends to sit relatively comfortably with residents who live in the more racially mixed arrondissements in the east. But for many of Paris's older - and whiter - residents in the west of the city, Hidalgo's social-housing programme is simply a menace. On a bitingly cold morning about a year ago, a group of well-to-do Parisians protested in the ultraconservative 16th arrondissement as the then-candidate arrived in her electric-powered car to unveil plans that included building thousands of low-income homes along the nearby ring road. "It wasn't very popular," she says with a smile. "I had lots of unbelievable meetings during the campaign and before, in which people would tell me that they didn't want 'the foreigners'. But we are trying to make things more even, and to bring social diversity to places where there isn't any. We are winning."

During the previous Socialist administration, in which Hidalgo served for years as deputy mayor, social housing in the city jumped from about 11 per cent of the total to 20 per cent today. She wants to take that number to 25 per cent.

Whether they like that vision or not, most Parisians acknowledge that Hidalgo has plenty of experience in town planning. As the long-serving deputy to Delanoe, she played a central role in some of his most dazzling projects. Among them was the transformation of a road that hugged the left bank of the river into a promenade, rebranded Les Berges de Seine. Today, the 2.3km stretch, once traffic-congested, is a magnet for skateboarders, bike-riders, strollers and tourists. In a city notorious for the lack of green spaces, the Seine quays have designated areas for children to play, adults to work out and passers-by to take in the view. Hidalgo's project even increased the amount of green space by mooring barges to the quays and turning them into floating gardens.

Her future plans for launching Paris into the modern era also focus on connectivity and transport. In an €8.5bn investment programme, announced during last year's campaign, she intends to spend €1bn turning Paris into a smart - and wireless - city. As if to assert her own "connected" credentials, she is a Twitter machine: she set up her account in March 2009, two months after Francois Hollande, but has tweeted more than 22,000 times compared with the French president's 4,400.

Hidalgo intends to encourage start-ups by offering expertise and affordable premises. For example, the MacDonald incubator project will create 3,000 sq m of office space in the 19th arrondissement. The city has also bought a disused railway plot from France's SNCF train operator and sold it to a consortium that includes Xavier Niel, the billionaire behind the ultra-low-cost Free internet and mobile operator. If it goes to plan, the project will become the world's largest start-up incubator.

On transport, Hidalgo says she is going to take the fight to cars - and, by extension, to pollution. In March last year, authorities restricted the use of private vehicles and were forced temporarily to declare all public transport free, as a dirty yellow haze descended on the capital. A principal cause was diesel; Hidalgo intends to ban diesel vehicles by 2020, stop older lorries from entering Paris, limit tourist buses that clog the capital's avenues and form pedestrian-only areas in the city centre.

Predictably, all of this keeps Hidalgo occupied. We meet at 5pm; she has already held a plenary at the city council and a meeting with representatives of French athletes to further the city's ambition to host the Olympic Games. After that, she went to a handball match. The sun is starting to dip but Hidalgo's day will stretch until at least 10pm. There are no complaints. "I chose to do it," she says of mayoral life. "Nobody told me to do it."

Adam Thomson is the FT's Paris correspondent

Photographs: Jerome Bonnet; AFP; Hemis/Alamy; Philippe Wojazer/Reuters

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