Saint-Nazaire

In addition to the Belfast A220 wing plant, those include a plant in Kinston, N.C., purpose-built to manufacture fuselage panels for the A350 and a plant in Saint-Nazaire, France, that assembles the fuselage sections from those panels.

For David Samzun, mayor of the city of Saint-Nazaire in western France and a Socialist Party member like Hidalgo, a boycott of the contest would have been “unsustainable.”

Unlike many other towns, Saint-Nazaire will show the World Cup final in a public viewing area on Sunday.

He visited the country's first offshore windfarm off the port of Saint-Nazaire off the west coast and hopes to speed up the build times of windfarms and solar parks.

He flew directly last month from New York, where he had warned the United Nations of the choice between “war and peace,” to Saint-Nazaire on the French Atlantic coast, where he lauded marine wind turbines.