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Illustration: Aaron Fernandez for Bloomberg Businessweek Illustration: Aaron Fernandez for Bloomberg Businessweek

From Georges Pompidou’s modern-art museum and François Mitterrand’s national library to Jacques Chirac’s Musée du quai Branly near the Eiffel Tower, France’s presidents have long shown a passion for lavish public works initiatives known as grands projets.

Emmanuel Macron’s project is shaping up as the most grand—and expensive—of them all. He’s backing an expansion of the transit system that would push the Paris Métro deep into the suburbs, boosting the economy and better connecting underserved areas to the city. “It’s a beautiful project,” Macron told a meeting of the country’s mayors in November. “It represents the ambition of our capital city and the surrounding region.”

But as construction gets under way, delays and cost overruns—the price tag has doubled in the past eight years, to at least €35 billion ($43 billion)—have touched off fierce debate over the lines to be built first. And commuters are grousing that their needs are being sacrificed for tourist-oriented projects such as new links to Charles de Gaulle Airport and to sites for the 2024 Summer Olympics.

The Grand Paris Express was initially mooted by Nicolas Sarkozy in 2009, and preliminary work began under his successor, François Hollande. The big digging, though, started on Macron’s watch. The original plan called for 200 kilometers (124 miles) of track and 68 stations by 2024, but the government now says less than half of that will be completed on time. The national auditor in a report has accused the plan’s overseers of mismanagement and warned that it will take until the 2080s to pay off the project’s loans. “It was easier to be in Sarkozy’s shoes and say, ‘We have a vision,’ ” says Clément Boisseuil, an urban development researcher at Paris university Sciences Po. “It’s another story to manage the actual operations.”

Concrete tunnel supports for some of the 124 miles of new Métro lines in the Grand Paris Express. Photographer: Sipa via AP Images

On Feb. 22, Prime Minister Edouard Philippe unveiled what he called a “more realistic” construction schedule and said the government would seek unspecified cost reductions to trim the final bill by 10 percent. “In projects of this size, it’s not unheard of to experience rising costs and delays,” he said. The timetable prioritizes lines to Olympic sites while delaying most others until at least 2027. Among the postponements: a link to a research center south of Paris that underpins Macron’s pledge to turn France into a “startup nation” and another that would serve EuropaCity, a planned €3.1 billion shopping complex northeast of the city with hotels, a circus, a concert hall, indoor skiing, and a water park.

One of the most contentious points is a related plan to add a nonstop link to Charles de Gaulle Airport. Financed by a state—guaranteed €1.7 billion loan, the line would traverse low-income suburbs now served by a commuter route built in the 1970s. Construction work could cause delays on the older line, according to the regional transit agency. “It will only benefit foreign tourists and hurt locals,” says Arnaud Bertrand, president of Plus de Trains, a transit users’ association. His group wants to scrap the airport link while modernizing the existing line and speeding expansion of the Métro to disadvantaged suburbs, in keeping with Macron’s promise.

Ballooning costs will undercut Macron’s push to cut government debt from 97 percent of gross domestic product to just more than 91 percent by 2022. Backers of the plan had expected office developments in areas slated for new Métro lines to generate taxes that would help fund construction, says Jean-Pierre Orfeuil, a mass transit expert who wrote a book about Grand Paris. But with developers holding back, “the project will be financed mainly by other taxes,” he says.

Planners underestimated the cost partly because simultaneously building multiple lines requires extra equipment for tunneling and hauling away waste, the auditor said in its report. Politicians made things worse by demanding spiffy new links, says Marc Pélissier, who heads the local chapter of the National Association of Transport Users. With some repairs, “existing infrastructure might be able to accommodate the Olympics,” he says. But “it’s more prestigious to get a new line than to renovate an existing one.”