If there’s one thing every candidate in the city’s upcoming mayoral election agrees on, it’s this: for better or worse, a quarter-century of leftist rule has changed Paris beyond recognition.
For the outgoing administration of Socialist Mayor Anne Hidalgo, the fruits of the city’s green transformation provided no argument.
Carbon emissions have fallen by nearly a third since 2004, and major air pollutants have halved over roughly the same period. From 2020 to March 2026, the city, known for its dense Haussmannian apartment blocks, will witness the planting of around 150,000 trees – although a third of these will replace those knocked down over the years.
Perhaps the most visible change to visitors and locals alike is the drastic reduction in traffic volumes across the city: the number of cars in circulation has more than halved since 2004, largely due to a series of policies by the city’s socialist mayors prioritizing pedestrians and cyclists.
Nowhere is this transformation more complete than on the banks of the Seine, which carves the city in two. More than a decade ago, Hidalgo’s predecessor Bertrand Delano banned cars from the left bank of the winding river for the first time since the 1960s.
The move was fiercely opposed by the city’s right-wing opposition – including the mayor of Rich 7Th arrondissement, Rachida Dati, who is now within striking distance of the Hotel de Ville. In the years that followed, Dati and her allies continued to campaign against the pedestrianization of the right bank of the river, the Pont d’Aina, and the city center.
In contrast today’s crossing is unrecognizable. Preaching what he calls “practical environmentalism”, he is running on promises to preserve Paris’ 200,000 trees, enrich the capital with 500 new green belts and create “oases of freshness” by ditching asphalt in favor of lawn cobblestones. Above all, he says, he will put Parisian pedestrians “at the heart of his campaign”.
Going green
It’s not just the conservative former culture minister on the right who has changed his tune on green Paris.
Right-wing National Rally candidate Thierry Mariani has pledged to plant another 50,000 trees, especially in schoolyards in Paris. Hopes to green the capital’s schools are shared by other candidates, including center-right Pierre-Yves Bournazel, who champions the revival of the 36-kilometer “petite cincher” — a non-looping railway around Paris — with family-friendly green spaces and dog parks.
The steady pedestrianization of Paris has found near-unanimous support among various opponents. Once heavily hostile to cars and the people who drive them, the policy is now widely welcomed by Parisians – especially as 300-odd streets in front of schools have been closed to pedestrians in the past five years. Bournazel has proposed expanding the measure to 626 schools if elected.
The divided left battles the right as France heads to the polls
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Hidalgo’s former deputy Emmanuel Grégoire – head of a left-wing coalition including the Greens and the Communist Party, and the narrow favorite in Sunday’s first round of voting – said he would create 1,000 new pedestrian-only streets and 300 new hectares of public parks. His team described more extensive changes, including a leafy 25-kilometer promenade spanning both banks of the Seine and a green belt spanning the city after Paris’s peripheral ring road.
Left-wing candidate Sofia Chikirou is pushing for 40 percent greening of the capital by 2032 and a green belt open to cyclists and pedestrians alike, connecting Paris’s Bois de Boulogne and Bois de Vincennes.
Only right-wing candidate Sarah Knafo is bucking the trend. The 32-year-old is pledging to reopen the banks of the River Seine to cars, raise the speed limit on the capital’s ring road to 80km/h and drastically reduce the steep cost of parking your car in Paris. These measures, too, must be said to be designed in the context of reducing the city’s environmental impact, Knafo emphasizes that a moving car pollutes three times less than one stuck in traffic.
A sense of crisis
Nathalie Blanc, director of research at the National Center for Scientific Research and director of the Center for Earth Politics, said Parisians were largely convinced by the urgency imposed by the climate crisis.
“The first thing we saw was the acceleration of climate change and population acceptance of this narrative, as well as the need for mass adaptation — especially in cities,” he said. “As recent work by the Shift Project (a think tank advocating the transition to a post-carbon economy) shows, the need for environmental integration and taking climate change into account is widely supported at the local level, where national policies are often insufficient.”
Ongoing environmental degradation is not a distant or abstract threat. City officials, reeling from a series of worsening heat waves, have recently begun planning how the city will cope if summer temperatures soar to 50 degrees — a very real possibility that climate scientists warn is a real possibility in the next century. The answer is alarming and unsurprising: not well.
Environmental policies pushed by city officials are largely built around reducing carbon emissions, but Blanc said Paris is better prepared to deal with the effects of a warming world.
“Although greenhouse gas emission reductions have benefited from substantial investment over the past few decades, in a context where adaptation remains a poor relation of climate policies, few public policies have gone beyond the strict logic of mitigation – often perceived as restrictive, punitive, environmental constraint, and ineffective in much of North America. Clearly compound regional adaptation issues.”
Quality-of-life
But while the climate crisis still looms large in the public imagination, many of the environmental measures implemented across France’s cities are rooted in more grassroots needs.
A report released last month by the Shift Project found that local representatives voting mayors and other municipal-level elected officials across France are pushing environmental measures more widely away from fossil fuels as concrete quality-of-life improvements for residents.
More than three-quarters of those polled listed protecting their constituents’ health or quality of life as one of the main motivating factors for their support for environmental policies, closely followed by reducing their energy costs. The report found overwhelming support among elected officials for practical measures, including renovating apartments and making them more energy-efficient and investing in public transit or pedestrian-friendly infrastructure.
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“Some measures stand out for their dual effectiveness in terms of mitigation and adaptation,” Blank said. “This is particularly related to the greening of urban spaces widely accepted by society and the thermal renovation of buildings, which simultaneously contributes to reducing emissions, improving comfort and increasing resilience to heat waves.”
But he stressed that not all of this support came from concerns about how to protect the city’s most vulnerable people from the extremes caused by the climate crisis.
“Beyond these specific considerations, the greening of cities corresponds to a process of gentrification, with neighborhoods bordering green spaces seeing their value increase,” he said. “For wealthy property owners, this may be a reason to approve this type of development. But from a quality-of-life perspective, this greening of cities brings a new focus on collective well-being.”
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