His name had been circulating for weeks. The suspense will have finally been partly lifted on December 17, the former Minister of Justice Christiane Taubira announcing that she “considered” to be a candidate for the presidential election. A week later, however, the expected miracle did not happen. Three and a half months before the ballot, this “pre-candidacy” announcement does not seem to generate much enthusiasm. Nor has it slowed down the historic collapse of the left in all polls.
“It looks like a cold swimmer who tests the temperature of the water with the toe,” wrote the daily. The Parisian. Problem: the big bath of the presidential election, we dive into it or not. The election takes place in four months. Pending the final decision announced for “mid-January”, the former member of Guyana went to Saint-Denis, near Paris, before visiting a hospital in Vierzon and meeting young people in Cergy.
So far, the possibility of a Taubira candidacy has elicited only mixed reactions. A recent poll by the new Cluster 17 polling institute grants the former minister 7% of the voting intentions, votes largely eroded from Anne Hidalgo (PS), who collapsed to 2%. Christiane Taubira is considered the “best” to carry a common candidacy by 25% of supporters of the left, far behind Jean-Luc Mélenchon (37%).
“We do not take the people by surprise three months before an election,” said the president of France rebellious while he was in Martinique. “We do not win the elections on a name, but on a program,” says the only one on the left who manages to narrowly exceed 10% of voting intentions.
Same icy reaction on the side of the Greens led by Yannick Jadot, to whom the most recent poll only grants 5% of the voting intentions. “After five years of political absence […], that is not serious ”, he launched on RMC.
“The left petaudière”
Only Anne Hidalgo (PS) and former socialist minister Arnaud Montebourg, whose candidacies never really took off, seemed to welcome this announcement. If Montebourg did not say no, the mayoress of Paris openly wishes to participate in the “popular primary” proposed by 300,000 sympathizers of the left. They propose to choose a single candidate in a ballot that would take place between January 27 and 30. Barely two months before the first round of the presidential election.
Former activist for the independence of Guyana, Christiane Taubira has not always been unanimous in her camp. The one that gave its name to the French law designating slavery as a crime against humanity (2001) had then aroused controversy because of its reluctance to talk about the Arab-Muslim slave trade. She then declared to The Express, wanting to prevent “young Arabs” from carrying “on their backs all the weight of the legacy of Arab misdeeds”.
In 2004, his refusal to vote for the law prohibiting the wearing of ostentatious religious symbols at school had caused debate on the left. As well as her statements in 2020 in favor of Assa Traoré, founder of the Justice pour Adama collective, who accuses the police of “having killed” her brother Adama during an arrest in 2016. More recently, Christiane Taubira refused to ‘call on Guyanese to get vaccinated, even though she said the vaccine was “the best answer” to the COVID-19 outbreak.
“Let us be clear: all that was missing was the ex-Minister of Justice François Hollande to add to the disorder that reigns in the left-wing petaudière,” writes the left-wing website AgoraVox. For the former Socialist Prime Minister Manuel Valls, this candidacy would “only add to the confusion” in a left which he considers today “in a historic political impasse”. According to him, the programs of the candidates who claim to be from the left are so different that the union would be “artificial and impossible”.
The former socialist Minister of Agriculture Stéphane Le Foll goes in the same direction. “The left is lost, it is looking for consistency, he confides to the weekly. Point. She is ready for all adventures, like that of an improvised primary at the last moment. Its problem is not strategic, but ideological. According to Le Foll, the left is at the end of a cycle. “It is not the number of candidates that is in question. […] It is the offer that it offers which no longer corresponds to the majority wishes of the French. “