GOVERNMENT

Anne Hidalgo

Mayor

The mayor of Paris for the last nine years, Anne Hidalgo has frequently expressed her support for the city's Jewish community in its struggles with widespread antisemitism. In September, Hidalgo announced that she was stripping Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority, of the Grand Vermeil medal, the city's highest honor which she bestowed on him in 2015. Protesting a virulently antisemitic speech by Abbas in which he falsely claimed that the Holocaust had been provoked by the Jews' "social role," Hidalgo accused the Palestinian leader of having "justified the extermination of the Jews of Europe during the Second World War with a clear desire to deny the genocide to which the Jewish populations of Europe were victims at the hands of the Nazi regime and its allies." Abbas' comments were "contrary to our universal values and the historical truth of the Shoah," she added. (Photo: Wikimedia / Creative Commons License)