She was the first woman of north African and Muslim heritage to hold a major French government post and she redefined political celebrity in France. Now Rachida Dati wants to become mayor of Paris and take the city from the left, which has been in power for 25 years.
“I want to bring back authority,” Dati, France’s culture minister, told Le Figaro last month, promising a law and order drive to arm municipal police with guns. Her opponents call her a dangerous rightwinger who would turn the French capital into a “Trumpist laboratory”.
March’s close-run mayoral election in Paris has become a policy battle for one of Europe’s most densely populated cities, struggling with a housing crisis and facing scorching summer temperatures amid climate breakdown.
Running for the rightwing Les Républicains, Dati, 60, wants to increase policing and CCTV, change the criteria for social housing to favour local workers, slash debt, and – after dressing up as a refuse collector for a TikTok video – fully privatise bin collection, which she says will give city employees more time to sweep the streets. She has promised not to reverse the left’s flagship policy of transforming a once traffic-clogged dual carriageway into a car-free pedestrian walkway along the banks of the Seine, but will renovate those pedestrian spaces. Though many on the left accuse her of seeking to undo green policy, she said she would work to create green spaces and tackle extreme heat and flood risks.
“Dati will clean the streets and bring order and security!” said Sophie, 55, a former marketing manager, as she handed out Dati’s leaflets on a street of butchers and fruit shops near Paris’s central Les Halles. “She shows you can succeed in France even if you weren’t born with a silver spoon in your mouth.”
Paris’s longtime mayor, Anne Hidalgo, a member of France’s Socialist party, is not running for a third term, and fears over Dati’s run for office have caused Socialists, Greens and Communists to come together from the first round to try to block her. Their candidate, Emmanuel Grégoire, a deputy mayor and Paris Socialist MP, promised to increase social housing and defend the left’s environmental legacy on lowering air pollution and building 112 miles (180km) of cycle lanes. The city is also under pressure over the vetting of school monitors after a scandal of child sexual abuse allegations in nursery and primary schools.
Dati, however, has challenges of her own. In September she will go on trial in Paris for alleged corruption and abuse of power. She was accused of lobbying for the Renault-Nissan carmaking group when she sat in the European parliament. Dati has denied all wrongdoing.
Analysts have said the election result is too close to call. “Everyone knows Rachida Dati and her personal story – she has an extraordinary ability to connect,” said Sylvain Maillard, a centrist Paris MP working on Dati’s campaign.
Dati has said growing up as the second of eleven children on a low-income housing estate on the outskirts of Chalons-sur-Saône in Burgundy gave her a greater understanding of the French electorate.
“Candidates talk of social housing in Paris, but I’m the only one who ever lived on an estate,” she told voters on a BFMTV show. Her parents, from Algeria and Morocco, couldn’t read or write so she did the family paperwork and was educated at a private Catholic convent school after her father did building work there.
“From 14, I worked full time, door to door selling beauty products,” she said, describing how she later escaped an arranged marriage.
Dati became justice minister under Nicolas Sarkozy in 2007, breaking not just a glass ceiling, but a “cast-iron one”, she said. She had a daughter while in office but was back at her desk four days after the birth. “I inherited nothing, everything I have I’ve worked for,” she said.
But Dati faces challenges from smaller candidates who could eat into her vote. Sarah Knafo, a European parliament member for the far-right anti-immigration Reconquest party is hoping to make small gains in wealthy areas of the west of the city. Knafo’s partner is the TV pundit Éric Zemmour who founded Reconquest and has convictions for inciting racial hatred.
Knafo has said she would be happy to work with Dati, which has been met with outrage on the left. At a rally in northern Paris, Grégoire warned that if Dati won, the capital would become “a Trumpist laboratory of the alliance between the right and far-right”. Dati said she would not form an alliance with a party whose founder was racist and had questioned her right to give her daughter a Muslim name.
Dati also faces competition from the centre. Pierre-Yves Bournazel, a longtime Paris councillor and former communications adviser for Dati, is running against her on a centrist ticket and is polling in third place. In a book published this month, The Battle for Paris, Bournazel describes Dati during her time as justice minister as being “inebriated with narcissism”. She in turn said he was the “physical incarnation of the stupidest right on Earth”. At his campaign headquarters in Paris, Bournazel said Parisians wanted more than a left versus right battle “of the past”.
Vincent Thibault, the director of opinion for the research and consulting firm Elabe, said: “Rachida Dati’s strength is she is much better known than all the other candidates … but her weakness is that she divides opinion more than her main rival, Grégoire. Some 56% of Parisians have a negative opinion of Dati, compared with 42% who have a positive opinion.”
Dati, who for 18 years has been a local district mayor of the wealthy 7th arrondissement, which includes government ministries and the Eiffel Tower, failed to win Paris’s last mayoral race in 2020. But a recent change in the voting system to allow a more direct vote for mayor could boost her.
“I’m sick of living in a Disneyland for tourists,” said Frédérique, 59, a former nurse who teaches medical students and would vote for Dati. She said Airbnb and tourist rentals were hollowing out the city and independent shops were closing as families were priced out of neighbourhoods.
National politics could be reflected in the Paris vote. Grégoire’s united left is also being challenged by Sophia Chikirou of the radical left party La France Insoumise, led by Jean-Luc Mélenchon.
Nadia, 60, who taught tax law at a university, said: “We’ve had the left for 25 years and that’s too long for any party to run the show.”
