Politics
Tale of two cities - and their mayors
Published 06 March 2000
Paris, too, has municipal mayhem, and a prominent politician who is at odds with his own party. David Lawday reports
He stands victim of his party's devious methods to stop him being mayor. He is old politics, outgrown by his party. He has done some unfortunate things. The party's new leaders want none of him. But with a momentous election at hand, he believes he can win and he won't go away.
No, not you, Ken. Meet Jean Tiberi of Paris, where municipal mayhem is occurring on the London scale. Ken Livingstone and Jean Tiberi might not, for one reason or another, hit it off. But they would certainly be entitled to have a good moan together at the injustice of it all. What is it about very big cities that brings out the worst in political manipulation?
Paris, like London, is new to the business of having a governing mayor in charge. The first Paris mayor was elected in the late 1970s. During most of this brief history, the post was held by Jacques Chirac, now president of France. It is intrinsically the most powerful job in the land after president and prime minister.
As the selection of Paris mayoralty candidates by France's major parties comes to a climax, you may be sure of one thing. The name of Jean Tiberi, successor to Chirac for the past five years, will not emerge from the conservative hat to fight the 2001 contest. His sole alternative, like Ken's, seems to be the painful one of going it alone.
It is too early for London to be acquainted with how these things turn out, but in the French capital's experience an independent spirit can go far. Paris proves that it is in the citizenry's best interests to have a freebooter in charge rather than a rubbery agent of the national government. Chirac, the founder of the neo-Gaullist RPR party to which Tiberi belongs, is no loner, less still a radical. But it was because, as mayor, he was always an outright adversary of the French government leader of the day that Paris was able to shake itself half free and change for the better during almost 20 years when he was at the helm.
There may at this time be a further attraction to going it alone in London and Paris: the uncertain appeal of candidates so far selected or likely to be selected. None seems to have the right stuff to sweep unstoppably into office.
But now the tale of two cities goes awry. Tiberi possesses neither the brio nor the popular support of a Livingstone. One reason why the conservative RPR is set on dumping him is that a sitting mayor whose popularity currently crests close to that of London's Steven Norris seems destined to lose the Paris election, and with it the traditional Gaullist stranglehold on France's capital. The gap-toothed Tiberi harps on being a "little" man of modest origins. He is not, he says, part of the political nobility. But the mark of a successful little man is to become big in office. After nearly five years, he remains incorrigibly "small". He blames his miserable popularity rating on RPR treachery. Indeed, the party has been trying hard enough to get him to resign. And how can you be popular when your party assassinates you?
Tiberi is a case. He fell into office when Chirac, his former boss, shifted residences along the Paris Right Bank from city hall to the presidential palace and wanted someone running the old place who would do as he was told. In Tiberi's charge, Paris is clean and tidy, but for the curse of "canine ejections" (the mayor's term). Traffic moves. Public transport works remarkably well. Parisians get a full dose of street music, street art, bike lanes and happenings devised more or less brazenly to curry voter favour. The budget holds. The city is far and away the world's number one tourist draw.
Tiberi had a good millennium fete. On the night, there was nowhere in the world that matched the splendour of his Eiffel Tower fireworks show. And while there may be more deserving calls on the capital's tax millions, a mayor who believes that the way to Parisian hearts is to display luminous calendar dates on the front of the said tower has, I fear, a deeper problem with good taste than with goodwill.
Paris, though, is not as above board as it looks. Rich, bourgeois and broadly gentrified after squeezing its raucous Edith Piaf blue-collar legions out to the suburbs, it would seem safe conservative ground. Yet, paradoxically, it has become the pit of desperate RPR efforts to maintain control. The right's mastery of all 20 city boroughs has dwindled under Tiberi. A glimpse at RPR fortunes nationally explains the desperation in Paris. The party is a tattered shadow of the Gaullist movement in its prime. A Eurosceptic breakaway faction under the choleric Charles Pasqua last year won as much support in European elections (11 per cent or so) as the rump party.
Any remaining conservative confidence in Paris is sapped by scandals surrounding Tiberi himself. At his wife's recent trial on fraud charges (which ended in an open verdict), an RPR local government boss who gave her a lucrative non-job at taxpayers' expense testified that Tiberi himself requested the favour. More serious charges have multiplied against the Paris administration. Investigating judges are pursuing city hall for election rigging - the blatant padding of voter lists with out-of-town names - and for public works fraud. In the latter scandal, Tiberi stands personally indicted.
The mayor, however, has a thick skin. He insists on standing again. Last week, he put to the populace his own gleaming take on his mayoralty record to underline his intent. "Paris is you," he exhorted. As if an appeal to gratitude will help.
The party is using tactics of Blairite subtlety to ensure he will not be its candidate. The free vote of Paris party members that Tiberi demands will not happen. Instead, an invisible "consultation" is under way. This means that the party's new national leader, the schoolmarmish Michele Alliot-Marie, is now scurrying round right-minded conservatives to erect a consensus that will confirm the rejection of Tiberi.
A likely replacement is Philippe Seguin, a moody RPR bigwig with long-standing pretensions to becoming prime minister or president. But Seguin has no grass-roots political link with Paris and has disappointed many conservatives by walking out of the RPR leader's job in a depression last year.
From the left comes Jack Lang, armed with a certain popularity among the young and liberal. But the former Socialist culture minister was best boy of the school of cronyism founded by Francois Mitterrand, the late president. To seize the candidacy, Lang needs to walk over Bertrand Dalanoe, a Parisian Socialist champion who knows the city inside out. At least the left aims to be fair about this. A straight- forward vote of Paris party members will select the candidate late this month.
A final cut. The "consultation" to put away Tiberi carries hidden menace: the sitting mayor emits the signals of a ticking bomb. Much of the city hall activity under investigation in Paris dates from Chirac's long reign. What does Tiberi have on the president of France?
Quite a lot, no doubt. He was once the faithful number two in Paris. Scarcely veiled threats from the mayor's side that he could tell all unless his aspirations are met send nerve gas through the trenches. If you need a break to clear the mind, Ken, better avoid Paris.
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