part of Arnaud Montebourg’s team joins Anne Hidalgo

What allow Anne Hidalgo a rise in the polls? Part of the campaign team of Arnaud Montebourg, who withdrew from the presidential race, announced Monday, January 31 his rallying to the candidate of the Socialist Party (PS), Anne Hidalgo. Twelve members of the former minister’s team issued a joint statement, in which they say “deprived of being able to vote for the one who wore our hopes”.

Among these new recruits of the socialist candidate are in particular Jean-Baptiste Barfety, director of cabinet of Arnaud Montebourg and deputy mayor of Gonesse (Val-d’Oise), Farid Benlagha, his special adviser, or Philippe Brun, deputy director of the countryside and municipal councilor of Louviers (Eure).

The signatories welcome the priorities of the program of the mayor of Paris, including “work and the reduction of inequalities“. They also approve “its industrial project for the massive relocation of activities to our territory [qui] takes its direct inspiration from Arnaud Montebourg’s project”, and “his clear and uncompromising attachment to the Republic and secularism”.

The supporters of Arnaud Montebourg, who had withdrawn from the campaign without supporting a candidate, did not all join Anne Hidalgo, currently estimated at nearly 3% in the polls. The teacher and essayist François Cocq, member of the collective Les Constituants, announced Monday in a forum in the magazine Marianne that he supported the communist Fabien Roussel.