Bertrand Delanoe was born in 1950 in Tunis and has been Mayor of Paris since March 2001. Now in his mid-term, he enjoys high popularity ratings among Parisians.

Key factors for his popularity are:
? his reputation for developing high profile arts and social events,
? his reputation for honesty and devotion to the city as instanced in his successful drive to stamp out corruption in City Hall, especially as regards housing
? his ongoing reforms of the Parisian transport system, and
? his raising of Paris's international profile, including the Olympic bid

The most famous of his arts and social events are La Nuit Blanche and Paris Plage.

La Nuit Blanche, or White Night, sees public spaces such as museums, art galleries, swimming pools etc. open all night, and monuments and buildings illuminated in colored light with music playing. This is now an annual event involving over a million visitors. More than 100 attractions were featured last year and there was music, including techno rock dance parties in museums as well as jazz and folk. These were combined with traditional visual arts, together with smoke pictures and light sculptures. The concept has since been copied by, among other cities, Berlin, Brussels, Budapest, Brussels, Toulouse and Rome, although Rome's Notte Bianca was marred last year by massive power cuts.

The other innovation is Paris Plage, now in its third year. This consists of an urban beach built on two miles of the Pompidou Expressway along the right-bank the Seine, between the Tuileries and the Quai Henri IV opposite Notre Dame, and a 220 square metre swimming pool. The whole event was open from 21st July to 30th August. Last year it attracted three million visitors and cost two million euros, more than half of which was provided by business. It is the place to go in summer in Paris. By 2007, Mr Delanoe hopes to have two permanent swimming pools there.

On housing, Mr Delanoe pledged at his election to reintegrate the Parisian population by buying up luxury properties, mainly in up-market areas of Paris, and making them available at lower rents to poorer tenants. This he has done by buying up properties in the west and centre of the city and thus making several hundred new apartments available as moderate rent dwellings, or HLMs (Habitations ¨¤ Loyer Mod¨¦r¨¦), although this has not been welcomed by all the current residents, who accuse him of pointless social engineering. He says that this policy will reverse the trend of poorer people, especially younger families, abandoning the city altogether as well as reintegrating the city population, a policy already practiced in other European cities such as Munich.

His policy is based on the 'Law for Solidarity and Urban Renewal', passed by France's Socialist Government in 2000, which makes it compulsory for communes of more than 50,000 people to have rent controls in at least 20 per cent of the housing stock by 2020. The aim is to standardise the principal of 'social variation', and prevent neighbourhoods slipping into either very rich or very poor ghettos. Mr Delanoe applies this law to each of the 20 arrondissements (districts) of Paris, which vary between 30 per cent social housing to one per cent. He wants to make the obligatory minimum threshold of 20 per cent apply evenly across the whole of the city.
Needless to say, providing cheap accommodation in the middle of Paris can have an influence on how people vote. The previous administration was accused of favouring supporters of Chirac's RPR in housing allocation. Delanoe hopes to bring down the 93,000 applications for HLMs (Habitations ¨¤ Loyer Mod¨¦r¨¦) by providing 3,500 new homes, mainly in the 8th and 13th arrondissements annually, and thus even out the city's already flagrant east-west divide

Delanoe was elected on a pledge to control car traffic and the associated pollution. He pointed out that ¡°private motorists, who make up a quarter of road users, use up 94 per cent of Paris's road surfaces¡±. He set out to combat this by restricting access to cars in the city centre. By reserving lanes on major routes for buses, taxis and cycles only and thus restricting cars to one or two lanes, he made taking a car into town unattractive. He wants to eventually eliminate motorised traffic on both banks of the Seine completely and plans a new tramway in the south of Paris by 2006.