Politics on course for a left turn in gay Paree

For several decades French politics has resembled an ageing repertory company, in which the same old faces have occupied the same old roles. In the New Year, partly through persistence, partly through luck, a new character may finally break through to capture a leading part in French politics: the mayorship of Paris.

For several decades French politics has resembled an ageing repertory company, in which the same old faces have occupied the same old roles. In the New Year, partly through persistence, partly through luck, a new character may finally break through to capture a leading part in French politics: the mayorship of Paris.

Bertrand Delanoë, 50, would be the first socialist for 131 years to occupy the post (which was abolished for more than a century until it was revived in 1977). Mr Delanoë would also be the first publicly declared gay politician to occupy any high-profile role in French politics.

"Gay politician" is wrong. It is one of Mr Delanoë's achievements that - in a country tolerant of most things sexual but sometimes intolerant of homosexuality - he has not come to be seen as a "gay politician" but accepted, so far, as a politician who happens to be homosexual.

Paris, the fiefdom for many years of President Jacques Chirac, is not socialist territory, although the left vote (Socialist, Communist and Green) has been increasing slowly. If Mr Delanoë wins the municipal elections in March, it will be partly because the neo-Gaullist RPR party, which once regarded Paris as its private estate, is catastrophically, even violently, divided. But it will also be a tribute to Mr Delanoë's patient work over many years in promoting the concerns of ordinary Parisians and campaigning against corruption in the Paris town hall.

Mr Delanoë - by turns an amusing, charming, hyper-active, choleric and passionate man - has run a low-key and deliberately local campaign, which has puzzled the French media because it contains few sweeping abstractions.

His proposals for the city of Paris range from the sensible and refreshing to the seemingly utopian. He wants to create "green spaces to rival those of London" in the most densely packed city in Europe. This could be done relatively easily, he says, by taking over derelict or underused land belonging to the military and the railways, especially in northern Paris.

Mr Delanoë would also push for the roofing over of long stretches of the Boulevard Périphérique, the orbital motorway that hugs the city boundary. This would allow, he says, the creation of linear parks on the roof of the tunnel and "soften" the boundary between the city and the surrounding suburbs, regarded by some Parisians as part of a different planet.

The city's first left-wing mayor since 1870 would push cars out of sizeable chunks of Paris, make cheap rental bikes available at large Métro stations, and turn the upper Seine quays over to pedestrians, cyclists and roller-skaters. Some of the ideas may seem far-fetched, but a majority of Parisians in a recent poll put the kind of environmental and transport issues Mr Delanoë champions higher on their list of concerns than the security issues stressed by the right.

There are some points of similarity between the ideas of Mr Delanoë and those of Ken Livingstone. The two men do not know each other but Mr Delanoë - whose grandmother, Renée Speed, was an Englishwoman born in Paris - hopes to visit the newly elected mayor of London in the New Year.

In an interview with the Independent on Sunday, Mr Delanoë said that he hoped to roll back the Chirac years, which have made the French capital into a more middle-aged place: a "museum city", a tourist city, rather than the world capital of cultural innovation, which it used to be.

"What I admire in London is its ability to be at once a city with great economic vitality and great cultural vitality," he said. "That is something that Paris can learn - or relearn - from London. In this respect I think that Parisians, especially young Parisians, are already ahead of city hall. There is great, new, innovative life here, just waiting to be encouraged."

Mr Delanoë is one of only three French politicians - and by far the best known - who have publicly stated their homosexuality. He did so in reply to a question on a live television programme two years ago. "It was not my intention to make my homosexuality my stock in trade.... It was my hope that the people of Paris, and of France, would be intelligent enough to hear what I had said and then forget about it. I have not been disappointed."

Mr Delanoë's chances of winning the two-round election depend partly on the continuation of the civil war between rival centre-right candidates. Jean Tiberi, the present mayor, has been repudiated by his own party, Mr Chirac's RPR, after allegations of financial irregularities and vote-rigging. But he is running his own independent list of would-be town councillors, to the fury of backers of the official centre-right candidate, Philippe Séguin.

One of Mr Delanoë's favourite stories is of a group of elderly American tourists who were shown pictures of the three main candidates and asked whom they would vote for. They looked at the permanently scowling Mr Séguin, the too-plausible looking Mr Tiberi and the unassuming-looking Mr Delanoë and decided, without knowing it, that the Socialist candidate was "the only one who looks like a mayor of Paris".