Work on every street corner, scaffolding along the facades, bomb threats in museums or airports… “Paris, at the moment, is a mess”, summarizes the columnist of the Financial Times Simon Kuper in his last post before the Olympic year in the French capital. Six months away from receiving the elite of world sport, Paris is suffering to make itself look good. “Hosting the Olympics is like organizing a wedding in the family home,” continues the British journalist. “The preparations are stressful, anything that is broken or damaged must be repaired. […] But once the guests leave, you have a brand new house – in this case with a swimming pool, since the town hall is doing its best to make the Seine clean enough for swimming for the first time since 1923.”
Beyond the renovations of the City of Lights, grumpy Parisians have no shortage of reasons to rejoice, according to Simon Kuper: the economy is taking off, with an unemployment rate at its lowest in fifteen years (at 6.7%), investment banks are “overflowing with post-Brexit refugees arriving from London” and Paris is becoming more of a bilingual city every day, “on the model of Copenhagen”. An observation which goes against the campaigns led by the many detractors of Anne Hidalgo and their slogan #saccageParis. “Few Parisians will have the merit of recognizing that their city is approaching a zenith in terms of quality of life,” says the FT columnist.
The bible of liberalism is not the only one to have a crush on our capital. Further to the left, The Guardian highlights the “green revolution” made possible by the organization of the Games, with the development of cycling and pedestrian streets. “In the 1980s and 1990s, architectural specialists made pilgrimages to Paris to observe its major projects, from the Louvre pyramid to the giant cube of the Arch of La Défense, including the Opéra Bastille at the slight bad taste, says the daily. Today, we find ourselves contemplating cycle paths and shrubs.”
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