On March 23, French voters will head to the polls for municipal elections, and gay issues will likely play a key role. In fact, the conflict over gay marriage, which dominated French domestic politics in 2013, may well save President François Hollande’s Socialist Party from electoral embarrassment ... at least in Paris.
Since 2001, Paris has had an openly gay mayor, the Socialist Party’s Bertrand Delanoë. At the time of his election, Delanoë was not a star, but, rather, a hard-working political insider who had come out as gay only in 1998. Delanoë's administration has been relatively LGBTQ-friendly, but not excessively so. It has given financial support to an expanded LGBTQ community center, but it refused requests for municipal funding for a national LGBTQ archive. Municipal support for the 2018 Gay Games bid was outstanding, but the first Paris bid for the 2010 Gay Games received much more discreet backing, with little public engagement from the mayor, who at the time was bidding for the 2012 Olympics.
Nationally, the French left is fairly LGBTQ-friendly. François Mitterrand fully decriminalized homosexuality in 1982. The government of Socialist Prime Minister Lionel Jospin created civil unions, known as PACS, in 1999, and François Hollande’s current administration laboriously instituted marriage and adoption equality (though it has now pulled back from authorizing surrogacy or artificial insemination for LGBTQ people).
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