Anne Hidalgo visit Ana Botella in Madrid on may this year./ Picture: madrid.org
Julio García. Madrid.
She just completed her first 100 days leading the mayoralty of Paris and Anne Hidalgo is about to make her first official visit to Spain next 10 and 11 July. Madrid will give red carpet treatment to this descendant of Spanish emigrants who arrived in France during the Franco period getting away from a depressed Spain.
The Parisian mayoress will be received by her counterpart in Madrid, Ana Botella, on Thursday and she will later receive the prize “Personality of the Year” awarded by the magazine Vanity Fair. An audience with Philip VI at The Zarzuela is planned for Friday followed by a meeting with the president of the Government, Mariano Rajoy, in Moncloa. This meeting has been included by the head of the Executive in the last days, since it did not appear on the initial agenda that Moncloa published last Friday. At the end of Friday’s morning, she will give a press conference in the French Institute of Madrid.
The mayoress Anne Hidalgo will also have a meeting with socialist leaders at the PSOE’s headquarters in Ferraz, although the identity of those meeting her has not been revealed yet, since next weekend the party will celebrate internal elections to choose the replacement of Alfredo Pérez Rubalcaba as secretary general. Last April, during the campaign for the European elections, the then head of the PSOE’s list, Elena Valenciano, received Hidalgo’s support in a rally celebrated in Paris.
Her meeting with Madrid’s mayoress will be the second one in the last three months. Both Hidalgo and the wife of the former president José María Aznar have been city councillors before getting to the mayoralty, although in the case of Botella, her rise did not happen through the polls, but to replace the former mayor, Alberto Ruiz-Gallardón, who became the minister of Justice at the end of 2011.
