As the Games get underway, President Emmanuel Macron and Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo are vying for first place on the political podium.
French President Emmanuel Macron must be looking to the upcoming Olympic Games in Paris as political respite. Following his Renaissance party’s catastrophic performance in European Parliament elections last month, a snap legislative poll called by Macron ended up depriving his coalition of more than a third of its parliamentary seats and plunging France’s National Assembly into complete gridlock.
The Games, due to kick off on July 26, will be a huge logistical challenge. Around 10,500 athletes and 15 million tourists are expected in the French capital. The outdoor opening ceremony, which will be attended by some 100,000 spectators packed along the banks of the Seine River, is every police officer’s nightmare.
But for Macron, whose second-term agenda had been hampered by an abysmal approval rating and a lack of a parliamentary majority even before the latest electoral setback, the first Summer Olympics to be held in France in a century offer a unique opportunity to turn the page on his woes and reclaim some political momentum.
For the French leader, “the Olympics will be a crucial moment of 2024,” said François-Xavier Bourmaud, a journalist and author of several books on Macron’s presidency. “If they are a success, he will do everything he can to take advantage of them” from a political standpoint, Bourmaud said.
Hosting the Games has been one of Macron’s top priorities since the beginning of his presidency. Less than two months after taking office in 2017, he turned up at an International Olympic Committee event in Lausanne, Switzerland, lobbying for the 2024 edition to be awarded to Paris.
Macron plays tennis with a wheelchair tennis player during a visit to a site near the Invalides in Paris on June 24, 2017, in a bid to promote the city’s candidacy for the Summer Olympic Games in 2024. Jean-Paul Pelissier/AFP via Getty Images
It is thanks to a special bill that Macron’s government introduced in 2018, which reduced red tape for the construction of Olympic facilities, that the more than 80 buildings in the Olympic Village were completed at breakneck speed earlier this year. In recent months, in addition to chairing frequent meetings at the Élysée Palace with the top officials involved in Olympic preparations, Macron has stacked his agenda with inaugurations of Olympic venues, proclaiming that the Games will be “a formidable moment of French pride.”
Macron “has heavily relied on the Games” in his communication strategy, said Gaspard Gantzer, a communications expert and former advisor to Macron’s predecessor, François Hollande. He has done so to bring back optimism and improve morale at a time when political, economic, and foreign crises are multiplying, “and no doubt also to show that, with him, the country is doing well,” Gantzer added. “He is not always very subtle about it.”
Macron, reelected in 2022, is constitutionally barred from running for a third term. What his legacy will look like remains an open-ended question, but the French president certainly hopes that a successful Olympics will be part of it.
The Games are likely to benefit Macron’s foreign policy. From his crusade to strengthen European strategic autonomy to his diplomatic initiatives on the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, Macron has sought to play up France’s role on the world stage. Although France’s limited resources and international clout have often proved insufficient to support its grand geopolitical ambitions, the country’s soft power can only benefit from an event that is expected to be watched by some 4 billion viewers globally.
The Olympics “will put France at the center of the world’s attention,” Gantzer said.
Macron has already sought to leverage his role as the Games’ organizer to bring about a France-sponsored “Olympic truce” in Ukraine, although reactions to the proposal from both Moscow and Kyiv have been lukewarm so far. Once the Games get underway, a flurry of diplomatic talks with visiting leaders will take place on the sidelines. A summit focusing on sport and sustainable development is due to be held in Paris on the eve of the Olympic opening ceremony with some 500 participants, including heads of state and leaders of international organizations.
Two police officers wearing hats and uniforms are seen in front of the Eiffel Tower, which has a large set of Olympic rings hanging from it.
French officers patrol across from the Eiffel Tower in Paris on June 19.
Stefano Rellandini
Construction workers carry metal beams across scaffolded stands in the foreground. The spire of the Eiffel Tower is seen against a cloudy sky in the background.
Workers build stands at the construction site of La Concorde Urban Parc for the upcoming Olympic Games in Paris, seen on April 26 with the Eiffel Tower in the background. Guillaume Baptiste/AFP via Getty Images
Of course, Macron can only accrue political benefits from the Olympics if things go well. France has been struck by several Islamist terror attacks over the past decade; the deadliest occurred in November 2015, when Islamic State militants killed 130 people and injured hundreds in Paris and its suburbs. Although these incidents have become less frequent and less severe in the years since, the threat of terrorism remains real.
In late May, French security services arrested an 18-year-old Chechen man who was allegedly planning a rampage near a stadium in the southern city of Saint-Étienne during an Olympic soccer match. The Games are “typically an event at risk, in a country that’s already at risk,” said Guillaume Farde, a security analyst and professor at Sciences Po.
Protests and clashes between demonstrators and police may also disrupt the competitions, particularly amid France’s tense political climate. A wave of violent riots against police brutality last year left two people dead, at least 1,000 injured, and $1.07 billion in damages. In recent weeks, left-wing protesters have taken to the streets to demonstrate against the far right in Paris and other cities, sometimes leading to scuffles with security forces.
Also on everyone’s mind is the chaos that erupted at the Stade de France, a stadium just north of Paris that will also host some of the Olympic events, during the Champions League men’s soccer final in May 2022. Crowd-management issues and insufficient personnel at the stadium’s gates led police to tear gas and pepper spray fans. Kickoff was delayed by more than half an hour, and French Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin was forced to apologize for the debacle.
During the Olympics, far more robust security measures will be in place. Police have been asked not to take leave during those weeks, and the Paris region will be patrolled by some 40,000 officers every day.
“That’s as many as were deployed in the entire country at the peak of last year’s riots,” Farde said. “We had never seen this level of concentration.”
Finally, there is the question of whether the Paris Games will manage to avoid the ballooning of costs that has marred other recent editions of the Games. The last Summer Olympics, held in Tokyo in 2021, cost some $15 billion, twice as much as the original budget.
At $12.7 billion, the Paris 2024 budget has already gone up by 15 percent compared to initial estimates, but it’s still on track to be among the cheapest Games of the past 30 years. More than half of the cost is expected to be covered by private funding; public spending should be largely balanced by the $5.7 billion in extra tax revenues expected to be generated by the event.
Hidalgo (center, bottom) rows with the co-president of the Paris bid for the 2024 Olympics, canoeist Tony Estanguet, as they are escorted along the Seine river by kayakers on June 23, 2017, during their bid to promote the candidacy of Paris for the 2024 Games. Geoffroy van der Hasselt/AFP via Getty Images
Macron is hardly the only French politician with a lot at stake in the 2024 Olympics. Another leader whose future largely depends on the Games going smoothly is Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo. City hall is involved in virtually every aspect of the Olympics: organizing the opening ceremony, setting up fan zones, keeping the city clean, managing an army of volunteers, and allocating the seats for the competitions.
Mayors of France’s largest cities have often been destined for stellar political careers on the national level. Former Mayor Jacques Chirac’s 18-year stint at Paris’ helm was a key to helping him clinch the presidency in the mid-1990s. Macron’s first prime minister, Édouard Philippe, had long been one of northwestern France’s most influential politicians as mayor of Le Havre.
Hidalgo, however, has so far bucked this trend. In the first round of the 2022 presidential race, she suffered a crushing defeat, earning less than 2 percent of the vote—the worst-ever performance by the Socialist Party in a presidential election.
Even a successful Olympics may not be enough to soften that kind of blow. But for Hidalgo, the event is still an opportunity to leave an enduring mark on Paris, particularly in accelerating its transition to a greener, less car-centric urban model. The Games could also lay the groundwork for a possible third term as mayor. Hidalgo’s current mandate ends in 2026, and she is yet to announce whether she will run again.
Since she took office 10 years ago, Hidalgo has closed large parts of Paris’s city center to traffic and massively expanded the use of bicycles. While most Parisians approve of these measures, the mayor has also faced accusations of being a radical chic—or, as the French say, a member of the “caviar left”—with little concern for regular people who need to get to work on time. The Olympics have allowed her to plow ahead with her green program. According to the city government, almost 19 miles of new bike lanes will be ready by the start of the Games, and thousands of new rental bikes will be made available.
Cyclists ride over a road sign demarcating a Paris 2024 bike lane along the Rue de Rivoli in Paris on July 3. Julien de Rosa/AFP via Getty Images
Another part of Hidalgo’s agenda is a $1.5 billion cleanup of the Seine. Despite some delays, a few select stretches of the river are expected to be declared swimmable just ahead of the Games for the first time in almost 100 years—in time for marathon swimmers and triathletes to compete there.
If not for the Olympics, “this would have never been possible,” said Boris Jamet-Fournier, a Paris city councilor in Hidalgo’s left-wing majority.
If successful, the mammoth project will likely go down in history as one of the biggest long-term benefits of the Games. But it has also laid bare the simmering tensions among various organizers and political rivals, who are in no mood for Olympic truces.
The Paris mayor and the centrist, pro-market president are reportedly seeking to steal the limelight from each other, with both publicly pledging to dip into the river in the coming weeks to prove that the water is clean and signal that they deserve the credit for the accomplishment. Throughout the Olympics, “Macron’s idea is to do everything he can to push Hidalgo aside, giving her as little space as possible,” said Bourmaud, the journalist, not in the least because whatever candidate his political movement will field in the next Paris mayoral election may have to face off against Hidalgo.
As the Games approach, the political bickering around the two politicians has grown louder. A few months ago, Hidalgo declared on live television that public transport was not going to be ready for the millions of extra commuters expected this July and August, criticizing the government and the right-wing president of the Paris region, Valérie Pécresse, who is in charge of local transport. One of Macron’s ministers described the mayor’s remarks as “shameful.”
More recently, Hidalgo slammed Macron’s decision to call snap elections so close to the Games, which introduced the risk of a change of guard in all the government posts overseeing the Olympics. She called the move “one more blow” by the president.
People look toward the Olympic rings hanging on the Eiffel Tower on June 7. Aurelien Meunier/Getty Images
For all the expectations that major sporting events generate among politicians, their real electoral benefits are often overstated. It is true that the 2012 London Olympics, hailed globally as a triumph, made then-Mayor Boris Johnson one of Britain’s most popular politicians. The successful Summer Games almost certainly helped him become prime minister several years later.
In France, however, neither then-President Charles de Gaulle nor then-President François Mitterrand reaped much from the Winter Olympics that they organized in 1968 and 1992, respectively. De Gaulle had to face a country in revolt just a couple of months later, resigning the following year. Mitterrand suffered a crushing defeat in the 1993 legislative elections, stripping him of his parliamentary majority.
Mitterrand’s successor, Jacques Chirac, enjoyed a spike in his approval rating after France hosted and won the 1998 FIFA Men’s World Cup, but the country’s apparent moment of unity behind its multiethnic national team hardly translated into a long-term political shift. Four years later, France’s xenophobic far right made it to a presidential runoff election for the first time.
The atmosphere that these large sporting events bring about is often little more than a “mirage,” Bourmaud said: “They create an image at that moment that does not reflect the political reality of the country.”
But inversely, when things go wrong, those in charge don’t necessarily pay a significant political price. The 1996 Olympic Park bombing in Atlanta claimed a life, but it didn’t stop then-U.S. President Bill Clinton from winning a landslide reelection barely three months later.
In the turbulent electoral campaign triggered by Macron’s decision to call a snap election, the subject of the Olympics rarely came up. Now that the new National Assembly is even more deadlocked than the previous one, the upcoming Games will do nothing to resolve the impasse.
Still, the time and resources that both Macron and Hidalgo are investing in the 2024 Paris Olympics suggest that they believe its political consequences will be far from irrelevant, for better or for worse.
However, at the end of the day, as Gantzer said, “people will remember the Games rather than who made them happen.”
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