Emmanuel Grégoire, then Paris's mayor-elect, attending a ceremony organized to honor outgoing mayor Anne Hidalgo, at Paris City Hall, on March 25, 2026. JOEL SAGET / AFP
Emmanuel Grégoire, who won a decisive victory over conservative Rachida Dati in the Paris municipal elections, was inaugurated as mayor of Paris at City Hall on Sunday, March 29, succeeding his Socialist predecessor, Anne Hidalgo, after 12 years in office.
Grégoire, 48, a Socialist who led a left-wing coalition list of candidates excluding the radical left La France Insoumise (LFI) party, was elected as mayor by the new Council of Paris with all 103 votes from the left-wing coalition and the abstention of the other 60 members.
After the formal vote, Grégoire, who was elected with 50.52% of the vote in the second round, will meet with Hidalgo in her office to complete the handover of power. Hidalgo, the first woman to have governed the city, served two terms as mayor of Paris.
The ceremony will be highly symbolic for Grégoire, who served as Hidalgo's first deputy mayor for six years before falling out of favor with her, after her crushing defeat in the 2022 presidential election. He later left City Hall to serve as a MP at the Assemblée Nationale in 2024. While he has avoided criticizing Hidalgo's track record, Grégoire has promised to focus on "hyperlocal" issues as mayor, breaking with his predecessor's style of governance, which was often criticized.
