“When there is a shared feeling of fraternity, sorority, of humanism … we Parisians, we French people, are proud,” she said.
Ms Hidalgo, 65, who, in 2014, was the first woman to become Paris mayor and was re-elected in 2020, is a divisive figure who has come under frequent fire for her drive to cut traffic and extend green spaces.
Critics say her penchant for ugly urban architecture has defaced the City of Lights and that the capital has become grimy and rat-infested.
National humiliation
She suffered national humiliation when she ran as the Socialist party candidate for the Elysée two years later and obtained a paltry 1.7 per cent of the vote.
She also infuriated Tony Estanguet, the Paris Olympic committee chief, earlier this year by warning that work on the capital’s public transport system would not be ready in time for the Games - an attitude he slammed as defeatist.
Parisian residents fled the capital
However, all such criticism vanished as the French and the rest of the world warmed to the Games, widely dubbed a resounding success even if almost half of Parisian residents fled the capital before it started.
Some of those who remained even thanked her during a walkabout on the banks of the Seine this week. Last month, nine days before the Games opened, she had plunged into the river to prove the water was clean enough for swimming events.
’Contested, mocked, caricatured’
“Our vision … has been contradicted, contested, mocked, caricatured,” she said. “It is a great pleasure to see the city the way we had planned it and to hear people thank us.”
In her interview, Ms Hidalgo claimed that she had been the victim of a campaign by a “reactionary and extreme-Right planet” which harboured “hatred” for Paris because it was the city “of all freedoms, the refuge for LGBTQI+ … a city that has a Left-wing woman mayor, and what is more of foreign origin and with dual nationality and an ecologist and feminist to boot”.
