The calculated rise of madame mayor

The next mayor of Paris will be a woman. That became certain last week when Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet, 40, a glamorous former ecology minister and parliamentary deputy, crushed three male opponents in the conservative UMP’s primary for the March 2014 municipal election, winning more than 58 per cent of the vote.

Kosciusko-Morizet, known by her initials NKM, will challenge the socialist candidate Anne Hidalgo (53), a Spanish immigrant, career civil servant and the successor chosen by the outgoing mayor, Bertrand Delanoë.

The French media is already salivating over the unprecedented "cat fight". A cartoon in Le Parisien shows Kosciusko-Morizet and Hidalgo locked in combat, with NKM tearing out Hidalgo's hair. Little separates the two women on substance and both are committed environmentalists, but the battle will be fierce.

Last year, Hidalgo vehemently denied rumours that she had been romantically involved with President François Hollande. NKM seemed to hint at those rumours this week, when she said Hidalgo’s candidacy was imposed on the socialists “with the extremely active help of the president, who interfered to ensure that she was the only candidate”.

Kosciusko-Morizet has so far dominated media coverage. The far right and traditional Catholics attacked her during the primary for refusing to oppose same-sex marriage but she refused to be intimidated, twice meeting with gay associations in the last days of her campaign.

The UMP is still divided among those who would maintain the law on same-sex marriage if the right returns to power, those who want to re-write it, and those who say it should be abrogated. "When I hear people say, 'we'll abrogate the law,' as if you could un-marry couples or dis-adopt children, it's not true," says Kosciusko-Morizet.

Presidential ambitions
With her Venetian blonde tresses, diaphanous face and tall, slender build, Kosciusko-Morizet resembles a fashion model or a pre-Raphaelite painting. She earned a degree in engineering from the prestigious École Polytechnique, and has been called "Ségolène Royal with a brain". As the the best new hope for the splintered French right, she has said she will be France's first woman president.

NKM was Nicolas Sarkozy’s spokesperson in his losing 2012 campaign. Encouraged by Hollande’s poor showing in opinion polls, Sarkozy’s supporters believe he could win the 2017 presidential election, and speak of Kosciusko-Morizet as a possible prime minister. Next year’s municipal elections will be the first electoral test for the socialists since Hollande’s victory. Paris has voted solidly left since 2001, but even if NKM loses, she will gain in notoriety and stature.

Kosciusko-Morizet's delicate looks can be deceiving. "She has a metallic hardness in her eyes," Jean-François Legaret, one of her opponents in the UMP primary told Libération newspaper. "I still haven't understood if it's steel or porcelain."

"You think she's holding a powder puff, but it's a dagger," said Camille Pascal, Sarkozy's former speech-writer, in Le Figaro magazine.

Kosciusko-Morizet has already claimed some eminent scalps. When she was 34, she was appointed junior minister for ecology under the influential centre-right minister Jean-Louis Borloo. Then, in a dispute over genetically modified food, she denounced the “cowardice and inelegance” of Borloo and Jean-Francois Copé, now the leader of the UMP. Sarkozy punished her with a transfer to economic forecasting and digital development.

But Kosciusko-Morizet bounced back. She got 235,000 Twitter followers, the same number as the Élysée, and in 2010, she replaced Borloo as minister for ecology, energy and sustainable development.

Last winter, as Borloo, the former prime minister François Fillon and the former justice minister Rachida Dati dithered about whether they should stand for mayor of Paris, NKM upstaged them all by declaring her candidacy first. The others dropped out of the race. She attacked Hollande in Le Monde, accusing him of dividing France to rule it, of inefficiency, laziness and disorder. "The head of state is the head of a gang," she wrote, "who appoints his friends and ignores the others. Worse, for him, a good Frenchman is a Frenchman of the left."

She took on Marine Le Pen's Front National (FN) when she published a book titled Le Front anti-national in 2011. "The FN is a menace to our country, to us, to our children," she wrote.

The mutual antagonism between Kosciusko-Morizet and Le Pen sat awkwardly with Sarkozy's right-ward shift in 2012, when he tried to attract far-right voters with provocative statements against immigrants and Islam. NKM had to swallow her pride when Sarkozy contradicted her before a rally in the town of Longjumeau, where she was mayor, saying that the FN "is compatible with the Republic".

Bling, bling politics
The rift between liberal-right and far-right branches of the UMP was evident when Patrick Buisson, Sarkozy's link to the FN, told L'Express magazine that Kosciusko-Morizet would scupper any chance the right had of taking Paris because she was "too divisive, too bling-bling for what is left of the middle class in Paris, too gay marriage for the conservative electorate, which is determined to defeat her". Kosciusko-Morizet accused Buisson of coming "from a political tradition that doesn't like democracy".

The former first lady Bernadette Chirac campaigned for Kosciusko-Morizet, whom she compares to her husband, Jacques. He also used the Paris town hall as a springboard for the Élysée. Since Chirac left the mayor’s office in 1995, the right’s share of seats on the city council has fallen from 141 to 63. The numbers still favour the socialists, but Hidalgo seems a reluctant candidate, a wallflower compared to the high-powered NKM.

“I’m not afraid of anyone, and that includes Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet,” Hidalgo protested the morning after NKM’s primary victory. All bets are on for next March and for NKM’s political future.