Paris Mayoral Race May See French Right’s Political Dominance Wither

It’s spring, the cherry trees are in bloom by the Champs-Elysees and so, perhaps, are the Socialists.

In this season of fleshy Breton oysters and the Paris-Nice bicycle race, Parisians appear poised to ditch the conservative allies of President Jacques Chirac for the city’s first left-run government since the Franco-Prussian War 130 years ago.

Change hangs in the air like new fashions in the Right Bank shop windows.

“The winds of change began to blow last Sunday,” said Bertrand Delanoe, the Socialist candidate for mayor who hopes that today’s final-round municipal election will usher him into the City Hall by the Seine.

In the first round March 11, Delanoe and his allies, the environmentalist Greens, were 17.9 percentage points ahead of the main conservative candidate, Philippe Seguin.

The right-of-center parties have since forged a shaky alliance that narrows the gap, but the polls still have Delanoe in the lead.

The Socialists’ strong showing is a sign of how this great capital of more than 2.1 million is evolving. The working-class quarters where singer Edith Piaf was born and raised are on the wane, reduced by rising real estate prices. There is a growing Parisian middle class, younger and more inclined to vote for change.

Nicknamed “bobos” by pollsters and political strategists, they are bourgeois in income but bohemian in lifestyle. They dine in fine restaurants but don’t mind paying high taxes for state-run health care and other benefits. They vote against politicians they don’t like rather than for a distinct ideology.

The main beneficiary of this shift should be Delanoe, 50, a Tunisian-born, openly gay politician who labored for decades in such bland anonymity that many Parisians are unsure of his first name, sometimes mistaking it for Bernard.

He was the party’s third choice for a mayoral candidate after the first two dropped out of the race. But he won new supporters by campaigning on bread-and-butter issues such as more day-care centers and better public transportation.

“People want to try something new,” said Pascal Marchand, 41, a cook. “The former mayor from the right didn’t manage his city too badly, but why not a man from the left? They’ve all got the same objective: showing they can manage things.”

Delanoe’s sexual orientation has not been an issue in the race.

“The left seems more modern for a city that is also more modern,” said Pascal Perrineau, director of the Study Center on French Political Life, a Paris-based think tank.

“What has helped Delanoe is that he is a Parisian white-collar worker,” he said. “He built his career in Paris. He knows the grass-roots problems of the city.”

As Delanoe has risen, the right has been self-destructing. Jean Tiberi, handpicked by Chirac to succeed him as mayor of Paris--which Chirac ran as his personal fiefdom for 18 years--became snarled in numerous corruption and voting scandals.

Chirac’s party, the Rally for the Republic, gave Tiberi the boot, but Tiberi ran anyway against the official candidate of Chirac’s party, the mercurial and often glum Seguin, former speaker of the National Assembly.

The rivalries and hatreds on the right are so intense that Tiberi and Seguin haven’t been able to form a genuine alliance for the final round. The best they could do was agree not to split the right-wing vote in some of the swing arrondissements, or wards, but not in all.

The last time the left was in charge of Paris was in 1871 during the bleakest days of the Franco-Prussian War. The short-lived Commune was crushed in a blood bath by provincial troops loyal to a bourgeois government based at Versailles.

It wasn’t until 1977 that French national authorities, wary of the fickle moods of Parisians, allowed them to choose their own mayor. Today, the police department and a host of other local services are still under the direct command of a civil servant who answers to the central government, limiting the power of the mayor.

“We are going to win! We are going to win!” Delanoe supporters chanted at a rally Thursday.

But the candidate himself has been urging caution. More than a third of Parisians didn’t vote during the initial round. The turnout was high by Paris standards, but it isn’t known if voters can be pried out of the cafes in spring weather twice in as many weeks.

Also complicating predictions is the fact that the leader of France’s largest city isn’t chosen by popular suffrage but by a majority of the 163-member City Council to which Delanoe, Tiberi and Seguin want to be elected. If Delanoe doesn’t manage the victory his supporters are predicting, the right could turn to a new consensus candidate, such as former Prime Minister Edouard Balladur.

For Chirac and French conservatives as a whole, losing Paris would be a humiliation and a bad omen for next year’s presidential and parliamentary elections. Although the issues now being debated are local, the capital has been a bastion for the right since the mid-1970s and is linked in many French minds with Chirac himself.

The right, from Chirac’s Elysee Palace on down, has been countering that “Paris is not France” and can cite its own reasons for optimism in the municipal elections throughout the country that have coincided with the contest in Paris. Although the right risks losing Lyons, France’s second-largest city, it has held on to the important cities of Marseilles and Bordeaux.

Numerous ministers from Socialist Prime Minister Lionel Jospin’s Cabinet who wanted to become mayors also were defeated outright a week ago, or could lose today.

Seguin compares the battle for Paris to a bicycle race. Delanoe may have pulled out in front, the conservative candidate insists, but “everything’s going to be decided in the sprint to the finish.”