In a November 26 interview with leading French daily Le Monde, Paris’s center-left mayor, Anne Hidalgo, announced that after two terms she will not run for reelection in the 2026 local elections. Hidalgo’s spell in office coincided with a particularly intense decade for the French capital that started with the terrorist attacks against satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo in January 2015 and ended with the 2024 Paris Olympics.

With Hidalgo stepping down, the race for the mayor’s office has already begun to heat up. Hidalgo’s handpicked successor is Senator Rémi Féraud, like her a member of the Parti Socialiste. Yet her former second-in-command Emmanuel Grégoire and France’s former culture minister Rachida Dati are largely expected to run. Running further to the left is another longtime collaborator of hers, Ian Brossat, who was from 2014 to 2023 Hidalgo’s housing chief.

Ian Brossat, forty-four, first entered politics in 2008 as a Paris councilor and elected representative for the 18th arrondissement, where he lives with his partner, Brice, a math teacher. Brossat, who himself used to teach French, leads the Parti Communiste Français (PCF) group on the Paris city council and spent nearly a decade as Hidalgo’s deputy mayor in charge of housing, emergency shelters, and refugee integration.