While certainly not the intention of media outlets worldwide abetting this PR stunt of a socialist mayor, it does highlight the question of
a) was the Seine (or any urban river) really that much cleaner 100 years ago?
b) since most cities with a polluted river tend to be situated down-stream – what actually did mayor Hidalgo really do in order to demand the praise here? I assume not much other than stop enforcing restrictions?
_Cleaner_? I'd assume it was _far_ worse 100 years ago.
I'm not sure what the mayor being socialist has to do with it. All across Europe, in every political system, there are water cleanup projects. Pretty much any big old city is going to have these problems unless you do _serious_ remediation.
> I'm not sure what the mayor being socialist has to do with it.
Socialists tend to be more interested in public access to common goods. Swimmable rivers seem relevant. A neoliberal mayor would probably prefer people to pay to swim in commercial swimming pools.
Although the mayor who actually does it is socialist, it was initiated by a right-wing mayor (Jacques Chirac, who went on to become president) famously announcing he would himself swim in the Seine in the 90s (he didn't).
a) it was probably not cleaner 100 years ago, but that's the year when swimming in the Seine was banned because of pollution
b) Paris is not really downstream of any large city on the Seine and most of the pollution by far is produced by Paris and its suburbs, not by Troyes 150 km upstream.
What they are doing to reduce pollution is explained in detail in the linked article.
This word doesn't have the same meaning in Europe, than it has in the US. "Socialist" mainly describes some sort of social democratism, even when some people calling themselves socialist won't accept that label for themselves.
On the other hand in the US you seem to call everything left of the republicans "socialist" and everything left of right wing democrats "marxist". And you even label totally unrelated things like gender expression "marxist".
The phenomenon of Americans calling things like "working public transport" or "clean water" "communism" has led to a reaction where people who want all sorts of perfectly normal social-democrat things start labelling themselves as "communist" on the internet. It's very silly.
I think Republicans have done a lot make communism a positive thing. For decades they labeled everything good as "communism", and as a result, a lot of Americans now want communism, because that clearly means public transport, clean water, better health care, etc.
a) was the Seine (or any urban river) really that much cleaner 100 years ago?
b) since most cities with a polluted river tend to be situated down-stream – what actually did mayor Hidalgo really do in order to demand the praise here? I assume not much other than stop enforcing restrictions?