Meet Ian Brossat, the Communist Running for Mayor of Paris
Ian Brossat made his name as Paris’s housing chief, bucking the trend toward marketization by expanding social housing in the French capital. A member of the French Communist Party, he told Jacobin about his bid to become Paris’s next mayor.
French Communist Party senator Ian Brossat. (Photo courtesy of Juliette Jem)
- Interview by
- Phineas Rueckert
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.
In particular, he led the charge to increase social housing in Paris and crack down on Airbnbs. While these initiatives have in general been successful — with one-quarter of Paris residents now in social housing — its distribution remains truncated, counting for just over 2 percent of units in the bourgeois 7th arrondissement versus over 40 percent in the 19th. “Overtourism” remains a major problem.
In 2023, Brossat was elected to the French Senate, where he is one of eighteen PCF senators. In a Senate side room named after writer and politician Victor Hugo, Brossat spoke to Jacobin about his candidacy for mayor, protecting Paris from the far right, and his plan to ban SUVs from the streets of the capital.
Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo has announced that she won’t seek reelection in 2026. You were one of the first people to throw your hat into the ring. Why are you planning on running?
Paris is a city that has been run by left-wingers and ecologists for over twenty years now. The Left won in Paris in 2001. Anne Hidalgo, who was elected in 2014 and 2020, has decided not to stand for reelection in 2026, and so the question of leadership on the Left is now open.
I’d say that the main challenge in a city like ours is quite obvious. All over the world, reactionary ideas are making dangerous headway. This is true in the United States with [Donald] Trump, and it’s true in France with [Jordan] Bardella and [Marine] Le Pen. Paris, in this context, is very atypical. Paris doesn’t vote like the rest of France. Paris is a city that’s attached to progressive values. It’s a city of social diversity. It’s a very mixed city, since a quarter of the population was born abroad. It’s a city that’s committed to ecology. So, it’s a city with values to preserve.
And the question we’ll be asking ourselves in 2026, one year ahead of the 2027 presidential election, will be how can Paris succeed in preserving these progressive values in a country and a world that are dangerously close to tipping over the edge? And I think I’m in a position to be the shield that will enable Paris to preserve its values, its way of life, and its identity in this dangerous context.
How do you view Anne Hidalgo’s record as mayor of Paris? What has she done, what hasn’t she been able to do — and how can you go further?
I take 100 percent responsibility for our record, which has been based on two main priorities. The first has been ensuring that Paris remains a city of social diversity, which has mostly been achieved through a very ambitious housing policy. The decision to make housing our top investment is political: a right-wing city hall would not have made the same choice. Along with housing, ensuring that Paris remains socially diverse has meant the development of public facilities, such as, for example, publicly funded nurseries. In the early 2000s, Paris was the worst département in France in terms of childcare provision. Today, we’re number one. Another example is school canteens in Paris, where school lunches for the most modest households start at €0.13 per meal.
The second priority is the green transition. We’ve developed cycle lanes on a massive scale: one thousand kilometers of cycle lanes have been created and, at the same time, there has been a significant reduction in car use. Paris is a city that was long designed for cars, and we have made the choice to return public space to pedestrians, cyclists, and public transportation, which has produced concrete results. In the past ten years, car-related pollution has fallen by 40 percent.
These have been our priorities, and I think they’ve borne fruit. So, what’s on the agenda now is not at all questioning what we’ve done. Rather, it’s amplifying the changes we’ve initiated.
Let’s focus on housing in particular. What was your focus as the city’s deputy mayor in charge of housing?
As deputy mayor in charge of housing, I fought to ensure that Paris remained an affordable city and an accessible city. The general philosophy is to allow those who produce wealth in Paris through their work to live there. Working people should be able to live in Paris, and we must fight to maintain social diversity. Otherwise, the market will totally disfigure the city. It’s important for the municipality to ensure that the general interest takes precedence over the predatory logic of the market.
We have pursued a policy based on two pillars. The first is the development of social housing. In the space of twenty years, Paris has doubled its rate of social housing. Today, in Paris, we have 25 percent social housing. This means that one Parisian in four benefits from social housing, which is not subject to market prices because it is rented on a controlled basis. The second pillar was, and still is, the regulation of the private sector. In Paris, for example, we introduced rent control, which means that private landlords are not allowed to charge any rent they like. Then there’s the regulation of tourist rentals and Airbnb in particular, which we’ve succeeded in standardizing.
One major challenge for Paris has been the hosting, this past summer, of the Olympic Games. There have been quite a few reports from independent organizations and activists saying in the lead-up to the Games that Paris was “socially cleansed” of its unwanted inhabitants, for instance, with the buses taking migrants and homeless people to other cities. Do you think this analysis is accurate, or is it exaggerated?
Above all, I think there’s a structural problem in our country in terms of emergency accommodation. Every year, statistics show that thousands of people, including children, are sleeping rough, particularly in Paris. The Olympic Games didn’t solve the problem, but the problem didn’t start with the Olympics, either. It existed before and it continued after.
What’s true is that we could have hoped for a greater social legacy from the Olympic Games. In fact, we were very insistent that the Olympic Games should be accompanied by a massive production of emergency accommodations. Rough sleepers have to sleep somewhere; they should have a roof over their heads; they should have accommodation and the social support that goes with it. It has to be said that this has not been the case.
With that in mind, the Olympic Games did have some wonderful aspects, and the image that Paris gave out — including on a political level, with its opening ceremony — is one that I’m immensely proud of. The values that were conveyed in this opening ceremony have been a breath of fresh air in today’s reactionary climate. Nevertheless, the social legacy of the Olympic Games is relatively modest.
You mentioned amplifying what Anne Hidalgo has already done. Concretely, what does this look like for you?
If I go back to the housing priorities we’ve had in recent years, we need to go further. I don’t think we should be satisfied with 25 percent social housing. Our trajectory, as set out in our Local Urban Plan, which was adopted a few weeks ago now, is 40 percent public housing in Paris by 2035. So, we want to continue to develop public housing. We can’t stop here. The law calls for 25 percent public housing in every commune. In Paris, we need to go well beyond that level, because housing is too expensive and because the market produces so much exclusion that we need an extremely substantial public sector to take a significant proportion of housing off the market.
We also need to make progress on vacant housing. We have far too many empty units, and dealing with this unfortunately requires legislative changes. That’s also the role of senators at the moment: to fight for new legislative tools to combat vacant housing. I’m in favor of requisitioning vacant housing after a few years. When a property has been empty for more than two years, it should be requisitioned. You can’t have empty housing on the one hand, and people sleeping outside on the other. Of course, there should be the right to property, but the right to property shouldn’t take precedence over the right to housing, as is currently the case. I’d even go so far as to say — to be a little provocative — that poor housing in France is a political choice. The right to housing is sacrificed on the altar of the right to property.
Secondly, we need to continue to make massive progress in terms of ecology. For example, I’ve put forward a proposal to ban very large SUVs from Paris. In a city like Paris, there’s no reason to use these behemoths of the road, which are cumbersome and more polluting than other vehicles. And in a city as densely populated as ours, they serve no social purpose whatsoever.
Let’s move to the political considerations of this campaign. So obviously, you’re from the Parti Communiste Français. That might be shocking to some people. There have even been recent instances when people have called you a communist and said that it’s outdated to be a communist in 2024 — not to name names. Is this political label something you wear proudly, or is it something you’re worried about?
I’m not hiding. Everyone knows my political identity and I wear it on my sleeve without any kind of difficulty. The Communists in France have been behind many social advances. We often talk about the French social model, which has been badly damaged by capitalist policies. But social security was the product of a Communist minister. I was talking earlier about the law requiring 25 percent social housing in every commune. That was [implemented] in 2001, under a Communist minister of public works, transport and housing. The Communists are part of this country’s history, and my conviction is that they are also part of France’s future because the solutions they propose meet the fundamental needs of the population, and particularly of Parisians.
At the moment, Hidalgo has indicated she’d like to name Parti Socialiste senator Rémi Féraud as her successor. You, on the other hand, have said that Paris needs a broad left-wing coalition of parties, including Socialists, Communists, and Greens. Why take that stance? Why focus on a left-wing union now, especially given what happened this summer at the national level with the Nouveau Front Populaire?
As far as the Communists, Socialists, and Ecologists are concerned, we’ve been running this city together for over twenty years. And so there would be something amiss about us going our separate ways in these municipal elections. We work together, let’s run together. I think the logical thing is for us to present a common candidacy from the first round of these municipal elections. Of course, we’ll have to agree on a program and a head of the ticket. But, in any case, it would seem logical and honest to the voters, rather than inventing artificial divisions that would be misunderstood.
And just to wrap up that point: Why should you head the ticket? Is it because it might be possible for the PCF — as we saw with the Nouveau Front Populaire — to bring together several movements that might otherwise want to go it alone?
Once again, I think you have to choose the candidate not on the basis of their political label, but that of their ability to run a winning campaign. So, it’s not a question of whether we need a Communist, a Socialist, or an Ecologist. We need a good candidate who can lead us to victory. I think I’m that candidate because, once again, in the times we’re going through, we need people who are solid, who aren’t afraid, who are capable of looking the Right and the far right in the eye, without bending, and I think I’m that candidate.
Let’s move on to that right wing. We’re seeing a society that’s becoming more right-wing by the day. We see the far right taking control of the media, imposing its discourse on the national discussion and often slamming Paris as dirty, unsafe, and out of touch. Do you have any concerns about the Right taking over the city of Paris?
Paris has always been a complicated battle, with a very even balance of power between the Right and Left. Most municipal elections in Paris, at least over the last twenty years, have been hotly contested. Paris embodies values that are very different from those that dominate on a national scale. Of course, the Right, the Macronists, are going to set their sights on conquering Paris.
They can’t stand this anomaly. They can’t stand our policies. They think it’s abnormal for Paris to put so much money into developing social housing. They can’t stand the fact that Paris continues to support refugee aid associations. In fact, the elected representatives of the Right have gone so far as to go to court to challenge the subsidies to [charity] SOS Méditerranée, which comes to the rescue of refugees at sea. So, they can’t stand this policy and they want to wipe us off the map. Of course, it’s going to be a tough battle. And it’s precisely because it’s going to be a tough battle that we need strong people to fight it.
We’re speaking just after Michel Barnier’s government used an emergency-powers measure called Article 49.3 to push through social security budget plans, in turn prompting a no-confidence vote [which brought down his government]. How did we get to this situation?
There’s one person responsible for the instability we’re experiencing, and that’s the president of the Republic. He’s the one who made the choice to call the electorate to the polls for parliamentary elections [the snap contest held in summer 2024]. He then chose to ignore the results of this vote. He is, therefore, entirely responsible for the mess he has created.
Never in France, at least under the Fifth Republic, has the feeling of a crumbling democracy been so strong. The French protested the pension reform, but the government ignored them. The French voted and expressed a desire for change, but the government ignored them. MPs want to vote to repeal the pension reform, but the Macronists and the Right obstructed the vote. On December 1, senators voted on a number of amendments to the finance bill. The government ignored them, too. The country is at a tipping point, and French people have the widespread feeling that they’re not being listened to.