—The less we see him, the better.
A few days ago we were with the photojournalist Albert Garcia in the monumental office of Anne Hidalgo in the Hôtel de Ville, the Paris City Hall. The previous week the mayor of Paris had bathed in the Seine. There was one absentee in the dip, despite having hinted that he would be there: President Emmanuel Macron. In the country of the wood language —literally, the wooden tongue: the habit of so many politicians to talk for the sake of saying nothing—, sincerity is appreciated. And Hidalgo’s response when we mentioned Macron’s absence at the river was emphatic, to put it mildly.
The Games have begun. And there is no respite between the Élysée and the Hôtel de Ville.
“Do it Games!”, headlines this weekend’s newspaper Liberation. “Between Emmanuel Macron and Anne Hidalgo, nothing goes any further” He nothing more It refers to the expression the croupier uses while playing roulette and can also mean: “Nothing is going well anymore.”
Liberation The newspaper claims that Hidalgo, although she was naturally seated in the podium of authorities at the opening ceremony, “was conspicuous by her absence, on the screens and in official speeches.” Macron, according to the left-wing daily, deliberately “overshadowed” her and “made her invisible.” The Elysée denies this.
Paris is a dual city. The left bankintellectual; the right bankcommercial. The west, bourgeois and conservative; the east, popular and revolutionary (the map of the neighbourhoods that were built during the Paris Commune coincide with those that now vote for the left). And another duality: the Elysée Palace and the Hôtel de Ville, the two poles of political power that pedestrians have been able to visit these days.
First stage: reception in the Elysée gardens. The dogs – Nemo and the Kazakh greyhounds Jules and Jeanne – stroll among the guests. Journalists ask for selfies with Emmanuel. Not a word about the mayor. A huddle around Brigitte, who tries to explain why first ladies do not have the influence over their spouses that is attributed to them: “They hear us, they listen to us, but they do not always do what we tell them.”
Second stage: lunch at the Hôtel de Ville. The topic is the Games. And Macron. Sentences jotted down on the fly when she talks about the president and his collaborators and his desire to sideline her during the preparations: “They have been very tough… They tried to push me aside… Strange political attitudes…”.
Nothing else goes. And now, as the pedestrian watches boxing on television and writes these lines, he thinks that the real combat sport is politics, and that one of the competitions to be followed in the coming weeks will be the one between Hidalgo and Macron. And he remembers Barcelona 92, where there was a head of state and another of government and a mayor and a head of the Barcelona IOC, and a regional president, and everything ended up working out. Those were the Games of Pasqual Maragall, perhaps of Juan Carlos I, or those of Samaranch…
And in Paris, it may not be the president or the mayor who will take home this gold medal. Because there is another candidate, a guy who has already won three Olympic golds during his career as a canoeist, who walks around the corridors of power in trainers and who everyone knows as “Tony”. He is Tony Estanguet, the president of the Organising Committee.
This winter, while eating a plate of pasta in a restaurant on the northern outskirts of Paris, the passerby asked him what kept him awake at night.
“Personally, not a big deal for me,” he replied. Tony. “Nothing shows that we will not achieve it”
Time, for now, has proven him right.
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