I won’t make same ‘mistake’ as London, says Paris mayor handling Olympics

The mayor of the gritty suburb of Paris housing the Olympic Village has said he will not make the same “mistake” as London by ensuring the Games are not only a “great event” for the capital but a “particle accelerator” for the poor.

Karim Bouamrane, mayor of Saint-Ouen, praised London for running rings around Paris in its successful bid to host the Olympics in 2012.

However, the 51-year-old insisted not enough trickled down to the local population afterwards.

“London pulled out the stops to make a big event that represents London but they didn’t pull out all the stops to say: ‘Let’s make a big event to improve the life of everybody.’ That’s the problem,” he said.

Originally, 9,000 homes were to be built on the former Olympic Park, half of them affordable for local people. But a decade on from the Games, which cost £9 billion to host, about 1,200 homes had been built on the site, most of which, it is claimed, are unattainable for many people in the area.

On the other hand, Saint-Ouen, population 60,000, and the surrounding Seine-Saint-Denis département, France’s poorest, would benefit from a “Keynesian” €6 billion (£5.1 billion) renovation programme resulting in “shared progress” for all, Mr Bouamrane claimed.

“We have gone all out for legacy,” the “independent” Socialist told the Telegraph. 

With his political profile raised thanks to the Games, he said he hadn’t ruled out running for French President in 2027 if he thought he could stop Marine Le Pen’s hard-Right National Rally “confiscating” French “patriotism and pride”.

The sharp-suited mayor, who has a background in finance, law and cybersecurity, said his town would recover 1,000 homes from the village, 25 per cent of which will become social housing after the event, which runs from 26 July to 11 August for the Olympic Games and 28 August to 8 September for the Paralympics.

“We’ve got seven hectares (17 acres) more green areas. We’ve got around 30 new businesses. And in very concrete terms for us, thanks to the Games, we’ve had a school and a crèche built, two schools renovated,” he said. A thousand local homes will be renovated, and another 500 council houses destroyed and rebuilt.

On top of that, Tony Parker, the French former NBA star, is setting up a basketball “academy” next year in a listed building by the Seine, with a new walkway to get there.

After three years in his post, Mr Bouamrane insists he has reversed Saint-Ouen’s “bad press” as poor, dangerous and drug-ridden, luring businesses and new university projects and injecting an American-style can-do attitude into the town.

Among his pet projects is to maximise the use of the banks of the Seine, including a taxi boat service to deliver commuting residents, 40 per cent of whom are under 35, to Paris’s La Défense district “within 15 minutes”. He has also refurbished the “English-style” Bauer stadium of local football club Red Star, which is heading for promotion to the second division.

With four months to go before the Olympics, the run-up has not been without controversy. Earlier this month, the interior minister confirmed that Paris would halve the number of people initially planned to attend the opening ceremony on the Seine, amid concerns over terror threats.

Anne Hidalgo, the Paris mayor, was recently accused of unhelpful defeatism by Tony Estanguet, the Olympic committee chief, after warning public transport wouldn’t be ready in time. The “CDG Express” train line that was supposed to whisk Olympics spectators between Charles de Gaulle Airport and the Gare de l’Est station in Paris in just 20 minutes won’t be open until more than a year after the Olympics end.

However, most infrastructure has been completed ahead of time, including the newly built 9,000-seat Porte de la Chapelle Arena for gymnastics and badminton. It was finished more than five months early.

The French, meanwhile, seem fairly nonplussed by the whole thing. In one recent poll, some 44 per cent of residents of the Paris area thought that hosting the Games was a “bad idea”. The running joke is that no Parisians will be left come July as they will have all rented out their flats for a fortune and headed for the hills.

Mr Bouamrane insisted such apparent disinterest should be taken with a Gallic shrug.

The French moan about the Olympics just like they complain about everything else, but they’ll love it once it starts, he predicted.

“There is an ambient moroseness, a nostalgia for the past that doesn’t even necessarily exist, a bitterness about daily life and anxiety about the future,” he complained, adding that France needed a leader with a positive, inclusive attitude and a common touch.

“In France, our problem is our inability to realise and be aware of our strengths,” he said, pointing out that the country had successfully organised in recent years a host of major sporting events, including the football and rugby World Cups.

“In France, we always have the same knee-jerk reaction to big occasions,” he said.

“Around 250 days beforehand, everyone says: ‘It’s going to be a disaster.’ The day before the event, people start asking: ‘Are you going?’ And when it starts, everyone says, it’s exceptional, it’s amazing, we’re so proud. Everyone enters into the spirit of it. That’s France for you.”

He blamed, among other things, an elitist and backward-looking “deep state” that “stretches back to Napoleon” and was preventing “80 per cent of the French” from advancing.