PARIS — To many Parisians, swimming in the Seine sounds icky. But starting Saturday, taking a dip in the famed river while enjoying a view of the Eiffel Tower will officially become possible. For years, the notoriously skeptical Parisian public was unconvinced that the estimated €1.4 billion project was worth it, especially as authorities struggled to keep the water clean during the Olympics last summer. Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo, however, is not one to let critics or pessimists get in the way of her plan to transform the French capital from a polluted megacity into an oasis of urban sustainability. Making the Seine swimmable is one of the final major projects Hidalgo will inaugurate before she leaves office next year. She will depart having overseen one of the most drastic makeovers Paris has undergone since the mid-19th century, when Napoleon III and Georges-Eugène Haussmann ripped up what was a fetid medieval city and laid the groundwork for Paris as it is today. A walk around the city makes clear just how much has changed since Hidalgo took office in 2014: The Seine riverbanks are no longer high-speed roads but instead pedestrian-friendly areas with parks, walkways and cultural spaces. Close to 130,000 trees have been planted on Paris’s streets since 2020 to help create new green spaces, like the 4,000-square-meter area in the formerly cement-heavy, car-centric Place de la Catalogne office district. The famed Place de la Concorde — once a busy intersection — now features palm trees and plenty of walking space. Hidalgo’s unabashed embrace of these policies has earned her glowing plaudits from left-leaning mayors across the globe. Former Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti — now the C40 Cities network’s ambassador for Global Climate Diplomacy — calls Hidalgo the “Joan of Arc of climate change.” Milan Mayor Giuseppe Sala says his Parisian counterpart “inspired” him to make his city greener during the pandemic. And Utrecht Mayor Sharon Dijksma, who spoke to POLITICO during a global summit of mayors to discuss the role of cities in fighting climate change, described Hidalgo’s work as the epitome of “political courage.” But Hidalgo’s zealous commitment to sustainability has made her a deeply divisive figure, and it played a large part in her dismal performance in the 2022 presidential election. She scored just 1.7 percent of the vote despite being the capital city’s mayor and representing the Socialists — one of the country’s historically most popular parties. A future in French politics looks bleak, as do any succession plans Hidalgo may have had. Opposition parties are gearing up for a shot at taking Paris back from the Socialists, and the party itself has chosen Emmanuel Grégoire — Hidalgo’s former heir-apparent with whom she had a falling out and now refuses to campaign for — as its candidate for the 2026 race. But while Hidalgo’s political legacy may be murky, her imprint on the city is set in stone. RED LIGHT FOR CARS Since the Parisian mayor was first elected in 2014, the core tenant of her politics has been to reduce — if not altogether remove — the presence of cars in the city. Authorities have closed off roads in front of schools; expanded sidewalks at the expense of street width; hiked parking fees for SUVs; banned through traffic to central portions of the city; and cut the speed limit on the French capital’s ring road, the Boulevard Périphérique, from 70 to 50 kilometers per hour. Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo is not one to let critics or pessimists get in the way of her plan to transform the French capital from a polluted megacity into an oasis of urban sustainability. | Teresa Suarez/EPA-EFE Airparif, a nonprofit that monitors Paris’s air quality, said in an April report that “since 2005, the levels of the two main harmful air pollutants — fine particles (PM2.5) and nitrogen dioxide (NO₂) — have gone down by 55% and 50% respectively.” The city’s official figures also show that the reduced speed limits have made Paris quieter with fewer accidents. According to Canadian urbanist Brent Toderian, such policies can actually end up being a net positive for drivers — despite criticism that Hidalgo’s policies do not consider people living outside city limits, who traditionally earn lower incomes, commute daily and rely on their cars. “The transformations that Paris made work better for everyone, including drivers,” Toderian said. “When everyone was trying to drive … it was still a city where, if you made the mistake of getting into a vehicle anywhere near the center of the city, you were stuck … For people who still need their cars for some things, if they can do short trips without the car, that frees up a lot of space.” Paris-based urbanist Carlos Moreno, who worked with Hidalgo, underlined that the city’s transformation meant more than just making it eco-friendly, and that increasing proximity meant “developing the economy and reinforcing local social life.” THE FUTURE Hidalgo won her 2020 reelection campaign by doubling down on a green Paris and embracing Moreno’s concept of the “15-minute city,” where all daily amenities are accessible via a short walk or bike ride. As the campaign to succeed her heats up, Hidalgo’s changes to Paris appear safe, with more Parisians growing attached to them despite the green backlash making waves in national politics across Europe and in Brussels. She even took something of a victory lap via an exhibition at Paris City Hall marking the 10-year anniversary of the 2015 Paris climate accord, which effectively showed off the changes made during her tenure. On the political side, Hidalgo also spearheaded legislation that constrains her eventual successor from reversing her policies and long-term goals, such as the creation of 55 acres of new green areas by 2040, and requiring at least 65 percent on any piece of land bigger than 150 square meters remains soil or plants, with no building or paving allowed. Voters unhappy with the city’s changes are likely to coalesce around the center-right options that will be on the ballot next spring. On the other hand, progressive voters could opt for candidates further to the left, who embrace campaigning on the housing and cost-of-living concerns that dogged Hidalgo’s time in office — much like Zohran Mamdani did to win the Democratic primary for New York City mayor. For Hidalgo’s Socialists, meanwhile, the mayoral race will prove challenging. The party is deeply divided and prone to infighting, and a recent survey by pollster Elabe showed support for the Socialists has dipped. Hidalgo’s imprint on Paris is sure to last, as is her international reputation as a transformative politician. But when it comes to local politics, an era may be coming to an end.

PARIS — French taxpayers footed a nearly €6 billion bill to host the 2024 Paris Olympics, the country’s highest audit authority said in a report published Monday. France’s Court of Auditors found state and local authorities spent €2.77 billion to help organize the Games and an additional €3.19 billion on infrastructure. The French government had initially promised that public funding for the Games would cost around €1 billion. Tony Estanguet, the president of the 2024 Paris Organizing Committee, disputed the auditors’ figures in a response included in their report and said the true public cost attributable to the event “does not exceed €2 billion.” He also noted that the projected economic benefits linked to the Olympics are “three to five times that amount.” Both Estanguet and Prime Minister François Bayrou, whose response was also included in the report, stressed that the Court of Auditors had failed to adequately quantify the long-term benefits of the Games, including the infrastructure investments that will benefit Parisians long after the Olympics finished, and focused solely on tallying up expenditures. For example, the French government spent an additional €214 million to extend the Paris metro network to make Olympic sites accessible via public transport by the time the Games began. The president of the Court of Auditors projected before the Olympics began that they would cost €3 to €5 billion. The report notes that the Games’ organizing committee was “largely self-funded,” but that public funds were used to ensure the event’s success. Securing the Games ended up being particularly expensive. France spent some €665 million to deploy 35,000 police and gendarmes each day near the various events

Just a year after Paris hosted the Summer Olympics, Europe is already jockeying to bring the world’s premier sporting jamboree back to the continent as soon as possible. European Sport Commissioner Glenn Micallef told POLITICO he wanted to see “the Olympic flame being lit again on EU territory at the soonest opportunity.” “The Paris Olympics and Paralympic Games 2024 proved that such a spectacle can be both economically viable and promote shared values and sustainability,” he said. “And to see the European Union visibly present for the first time was tremendous,” Micallef added. The EU’s circle of stars was flown at the Games alongside the Olympic flag for the first time last year. With the upcoming Summer Olympics to be held in Los Angeles in 2028, followed by Brisbane in 2032, the earliest Europe could host the Summer Games is 2036 — though Milan will host the Winter Games in 2026. London’s Mayor Sadiq Khan told The Times in an interview published Monday that he wanted the British capital to be “the sporting capital of the world” and would be keen to explore a bid to host the Games in 2040. London last staged the Olympics in 2012, meaning it already has the necessary infrastructure and could be “the greenest Games ever,” Khan added. It’s unlikely that the International Olympic Committee, which organizes Olympic events, would be in favor of Europe hosting two consecutive Olympic Games, however. Meanwhile, incoming German Chancellor Friedrich Merz has also committed to supporting a bid to bring the Olympics back to Germany, according to Volker Bouffier, the former minister-president of Hessen who now serves on the board of the German Olympic Sports Confederation, or DOSB. Bouffier told Sport Bild on Friday that he personally asked Merz to support a German bid to host the Olympics in 2036, 2040 or 2044, to which Merz responded that Bouffier could “rely on” him. The DOSB has not yet selected a city to represent Germany in a bid. The last time the country hosted the Summer Olympics was in 1972, in Munich. Isabel Díaz Ayuso, the president of the Madrid region, last year called for the Spanish capital to host the Games and said the region was “working on” a bid. A Spanish business association, the Madrid Business Forum, backed that proposal this week. The host city for 2036 has yet to be determined, though Istanbul, Santiago, and Nusantara — the planned new capital of Indonesia — have all signaled interest. The IOC has no timeline for selecting the 2036 or 2040 host cities.

The world is bracing for President-elect Donald Trump to withdraw the U.S. from the Paris climate agreement for the second time — only this time, he could move faster and with less restraint. Trump’s vow to pull out would once again leave the United States as one of the only countries not to be a party to the 2015 pact, in which nearly 200 governments have made non-binding pledges to reduce their planet-warming pollution. His victory in last week’s election threatens to overshadow the COP29 climate summit that begins on Monday in Azerbaijan, where the U.S. and other countries will hash out details related to phasing down fossil fuels and providing climate aid to poorer nations. The United States’ absence from the deal would put other countries on the hook to make bigger reductions to their climate pollution. But it would also raise inevitable questions from some countries about how much more effort they should put in when the world’s second-largest greenhouse gas polluter is walking away. “Countries are very committed to Paris, I don’t think there’s any question about that,” said David Waskow, head of the World Resources Institute’s international climate initiative. “What I do think is at risk is whether the world is able to follow through on what it committed to in Paris.” The Trump campaign told POLITICO in June that the former president would quit the global pact, as he did in 2017 during his first stint in the office. A campaign spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment for this story. Trump said as recently as last weekend that climate change is “all a big hoax.” “We don’t have a global warming problem,” he said at a campaign appearance, in spite of a mountain of data that says otherwise — and projections that 2024 is set to be the warmest year on record, surpassing a milestone set last year. Once Trump takes office in January, he could file a request to the U.N. to withdraw from the agreement again. It would take a year for that move to take effect under the terms of the pact, not the three years it did previously. Over that time, the Trump administration could ignore past U.S. climate commitments established by President Joe Biden and refuse to submit any new plans for reducing greater amounts of carbon pollution, according to analysts. As POLITICO reported in June, some conservatives have also laid the groundwork for Trump to go even further if he chose to. One option would remove the United States from the 1992 U.N. treaty underpinning the entire framework for the annual global climate negotiations, a much more definitive step that could do lasting damage to the effort to limit the Earth’s warming. Either way, a U.S. withdrawal could leave the country sidelined from international discussions about the expansion of clean energy, allowing China to continue out-competing America on solar panels, electric vehicles and other green technologies, said Jonathan Pershing, a special envoy for climate change during the Obama administration. “China is the world’s largest trading partner for virtually every country in the world, so their ability to influence is not diminished,” he told reporters Thursday. “If anything, it is increased with U.S. withdrawal.” He added: “I think we lose when the U.S. is out, and with the U.S. out, China will step up, but in a very different way.” The U.S. was an architect of the 2015 Paris Agreement, which requires the 195 countries that signed it to submit national plans for cutting greenhouse gas emissions and provide updates about their progress toward hitting those marks. It also calls on wealthier nations to pay for climate projects, but there are no penalties for not adhering to the agreement. In the nine years since it was established, climate pollution has continued to rise globally — though arguably at a slower rate than without it. Disasters have hit harder from Nepal to North Carolina, inflating the need for climate finance into the trillions of dollars each year. A SECOND EXIT The Paris Agreement was about a year old when Trump announced that he served the people “of Pittsburgh, not Paris” and was withdrawing. The move stirred international shock — and fears that other countries might follow the U.S. out the door. Now the agreement “is in a different stage in its existence,” said Todd Stern, who helped finalize the Paris deal as the U.S. climate envoy. “I would be very surprised to see countries actually pull out.” Biden reentered the agreement in 2021 and then announced that the U.S. would slash its emissions in half by 2030 from 2005 levels. U.S. carbon pollution is falling, but not fast enough to meet Biden’s pledge — and stepped-up action by states, cities and businesses can get only part of the way there in the absence of stronger federal efforts. The nations that signed the Paris deal are supposed to submit new plans by mid-February. If the world’s biggest economy isn’t contributing, it could send a signal to opponents of stringent climate action in China, India or Europe to do less. “There are interests in all of these other countries that want to promote continued reliance on fossil fuels and a resistance to climate ambition,” said Alden Meyer, a senior associate at the climate think tank E3G. A test of how committed other nations are to the Paris Agreement will come at COP29. They’re expected to set a new target for global climate aid — one that could reach up to $1 trillion a year. Biden administration officials will be at the table. But with a future Trump presidency looming over the talks, other countries might be less inclined to contribute more money.

Seven individuals have been detained for allegedly harassing Thomas Jolly, the artistic director for the 2024 Summer Olympics. The arrests took place between Tuesday and Thursday, the Paris Prosecutor’s Office said on Friday, following an investigation into complaints by Jolly of threats after the Olympics opening ceremony in July. The suspects must appear at a hearing in March 2025, where they will face charges of repeated death threats, cyber harassment and aggravated insults related to sexual orientation and actual or perceived religious affiliation. French authorities launched the investigation in August following a formal complaint by Jolly, who reported receiving numerous threats after the opening ceremony, which generated a backlash centered primarily around a segment titled “Festivity,” featuring dancers and drag performers in a scene some saw as reminiscent of Leonardo Da Vinci’s “The Last Supper.” The performance sparked outrage among various Christian groups, who accused Jolly of disrespecting Christianity, and drew criticism from right-wing politicians such as Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and former U.S. President Donald Trump. French DJ Barbara Butch, who performed during part of the ceremony, also filed several complaints in late July after receiving death and rape threats. Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo responded strongly to the criticism, extending her support to Jolly and condemning the backlash. “Fuck the reactionaries, fuck this far right, fuck all of those who would like to lock us into a war of all against all,” she said during an interview to Le Monde in August.