This time, it’s official. The former minister Christiane Taubira formalized her candidacy for the presidential election in Lyon on Saturday, January 15, and thus comes to swell the ranks already well fleshed out on the left. The former justice minister said she wanted to respond “to anger” It front of “social injustice”. In particular, it wishes to convene a “salary conference” and defend a government “who knows how to dialogue instead of moralizing and caporalizing”. Christiane Taubira will first participate in the popular citizen primary, which will take place from January 27 to 30.
Christiane Taubira’s life had been divided for several years between her native Guyana and her Parisian apartment. She finally returns to the political scene and throws herself, as in 2002, into the presidential battle, to try, she says, to bring together a left in “the dead end”. “If I, who can stand up, I capitulate, everything collapses. (…) If I don’t take my responsibilities, then who will?”, explained to The Obs the one who said in 2019 “not liking the routine”.
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Considered by some to be a “icon” of left, it is the object of solid hatreds on the right and the extreme right, and even sometimes in its own camp. Known for her strong character, she has however “a real ability to generate sympathy and support”, says ex-rebellious PS Christian Paul, who is campaigning alongside him. “She is a stateswoman, free, with a republican background”, praises Guillaume Lacroix, president of the PRG, for whom “she embodies the moral left”. He judges her “unclassifiable. This is his strength but also the angles on which his opponents are constantly hitting”.
For Christian Paul, it is “a very central candidate on the left, a meeting point for the left and ecology”, recalling that she notably fought gold mining in Guyana. But for a member of the management of EELV, he misses “a highly developed ecological ideological corpus” to convince leftist voters. “On a lot of things, I don’t know what she really thinks”, also confides the deputy LFI Alexis Corbière. At the end of September, his refusal to call for vaccination against Covid in Guyana caused an outcry. She has since backtracked on that statement and repeatedly defended vaccination.