Pierre Liscia is the spokesperson for
Libres!
, former elected of Paris and author of
La Honte
(Albin Michel).
Notice of heavy weather on the Town Hall!
While the Prime Minister gave the French a reprieve of a few days before deciding on new restrictive measures to fight against Covid 19, Emmanuel Grégoire, the first deputy mayor of Paris, took everyone by surprise and announced in the following the speech of Jean Castex that Anne Hidalgo was preparing to propose a strict confinement of three weeks in order to
"restore oxygen and have the prospect of reopening everything"
including bars, restaurants and cultural venues.
The objective of the maneuver is simple: to finally make the curves of its champion shudder in the presidential polls by setting a trap for the government.
If he accepts the proposal initiated by the mayor of Paris, she will be able to take advantage of it to better rise to the level of the head of government;
if he refuses it, it will be able to denounce its wait-and-see attitude and its lack of political courage in order to better highlight its keen sense of responsibility and of the general interest.
Except that everything did not go as planned.
In just a few hours, Anne Hidalgo managed the feat of achieving unanimity against her: majority as opposition in unison to denounce a demagogic proposal devoid of any scientific basis.
"Nonsense!"
will even dare the Prime Minister.
And for good reason, from a strictly health point of view, who can reasonably believe that a strict confinement of three weeks in the capital would be enough to overcome the pandemic and "reopen everything" even as the variants change the situation and that the vaccination slips?
How can the mayor of Paris push cynicism to the point of ignoring the inextricable complexity of the health situation for the sole purpose of occupying the national media space in the run-up to the presidential elections?
To read also: Covid-19: confusion around the reconfinement proposed by the town hall of Paris
Faced with the bronca and by not tainting her presidential stature, Anne Hidalgo has no other choice but to sound the fold and disavow the factotum that she had yet charged to mount to the front.
Crestfallen, Emmanuel Grégoire is ordered to backpedal in the semolina, even if it means saying the opposite of what he had clearly stated less than twelve hours earlier.
Even today, no one can say with certainty whether it was a badly put together coup, a gross and inappropriate excess of zeal, a flare-up of egocentric fever or the distressing demonstration. of a team at bay, full of itself and steeped in amateurism.
Certainly a bit of all of this at the same time ...
How can the mayor of Paris push cynicism to the point of ignoring the inextricable complexity of the health situation for the sole purpose of occupying the national media space in the run-up to the presidential elections?
Pierre Liscia
This new episode is not only the umpteenth quack of hazardous municipal communication, but it is symptomatic of the erratic governance of the city of Paris, its dilettante management and the short-termism of its decisions.
It is also revealing of the narrow and Parisian-centric vision of the capital by the municipal executive and of its indifference - even its contempt - towards the suburbs and the millions of Ile-de-France who live there.
Should we still remember that Paris is neither an island in the middle of the ocean nor an impenetrable citadel?
Economic heart of the country and geographical heart of the Île-de-France region where all the transport networks converge, hundreds of thousands of Parisians cross the ring road every day when millions of Ile-de-France residents go there to work, often occupants these so-called “first” and “second” line jobs.
How can the Parisian general staff be so disconnected to the point of imagining imposing such a brutal decision without the slightest prior consultation with elected officials, with professional organizations, with Parisians and even less with neighboring communities?
Evidence that Valérie Pécresse immediately reaffirmed in the columns of Le
Parisien
: “
I have always defended a regional vision to be effective (…).
Decisions at the departmental level in Ile-de-France seem to me illusory.
How do you do in a region where millions of people take public transport every day to go to work and move daily from one department to another?
"A position taken up by many elected Ile-de-France residents, all political tendencies combined, as well as by government ministers.
Read also: Anne Hidalgo's tactical faux pas
This is not the first time that the City of Paris has drawn the wrath of Ile-de-France residents.
Already in November 2016, following the brutal and unilateral decision of Anne Hidalgo to pedestrianize the tracks on the bank, 168 suburban mayors had united behind Valérie Pécresse to denounce in an open letter an
"aggression"
by the City of Paris against its suburbs and its
"indifference to the inhabitants of the
inner and outer suburbs
"
, considering that their
citizens
were the first to suffer the inconvenience of the sudden closure and without compensatory measure of a traffic axis borrowed by 43 000 vehicles per day.
A few months later, it was Anne Hidalgo's plan to create an urban toll at the gates of Paris that again angered suburban mayors.
In March 2018, the mayor of Mantes-la-Jolie even begged Anne Hidalgo by mail to get down from her ivory tower to finally become aware of the daily difficulties of
"suburbanites"
, before concluding: "
Paris cannot decide alone: the decisions taken go far beyond the ring road!
»A series of decisions and announcements which only reinforced the feelings of territorial relegation and social injustice of the inhabitants of the suburbs towards the capital.
However, is not Anne Hidalgo proud of having established the principles of consultation and co-construction as cardinal values of her municipal catechism?
This is not the first time that the town hall of Paris has thus drawn the wrath of the Ile-de-France residents
Pierre Liscia
By proposing strict confinement of Paris for three weeks, Emmanuel Grégoire and Anne Hidalgo recalled at their expense that the future of the capital is intrinsically linked to that of its suburbs and that its decisions made in the privacy of the gilding of their offices are reflected in the daily lives of twelve million Ile-de-France residents.
At a time when Valérie Pécresse is working to reduce the fractures and territorial inequalities and claims to seek to erase the barrier of the ring road, the Mayor of Paris on the contrary gives the feeling of a city which would entrench itself there as in a besieged fortress.
A shame for the one who now counts in her municipal team Audrey Pulvar, candidate for the presidency of the Île-de-France Region.
The authoritarian and brutal unilateralism of the decisions of the executive of which it is a member is it really in conformity with the vision of the “Île-de-France in common” that it claims so much?