Christiane Taubira was nominated Sunday, January 30 candidate for the presidential election at the end of the popular Primary. Nearly 400,000 people took part in this vote. With, in hollow, a question: is the number enough to carry an application? In any case, that is what Christiane Taubira seems to think! She had promised that she would in no case be a candidate more on the left. Today, however, this is the case, since his name joins those of Anne Hidalgo, Yannick Jadot, Jean-Luc Mélenchon and Fabien Roussel.
She was Monday morning the guest of franceinfo. Let’s see what she answers when asked what justifies her candidacy: “I am one more candidate for those who consider that a democratic process is worth absolutely nothing. That half a million people who register and vote is worth nothing at all. ( …) Either we accept that the democratic process makes sense in our democracy: me, it’s my bias. The democratic process makes sense, it is the biggest foundation of citizen legitimacy.”
Thus, for Christiane Taubira, things are clear: the primary in which she participated gathered the most people and she is therefore the most legitimate. You can hear it… except for a few nuances. Because in rhetoric, there is nothing less objective than a number. Here, Christiane Taubira tells us about “half a million” citizens. Certainly. We can still notice that it chose to express this value in millions, and by rounding up. But if we rather agree that it carries the hopes of 390,000 people, knowing that there are 45 million voters in France, the number suddenly seems smaller.
Especially since everything also depends on the reference value that we take to establish a comparison. The popular primary has, of course, gathered four times more voters than the environmental primary. But it is six times less than the socialist primary which, in 2012, designated François Hollande. So, of course, Christiane Taubira has the argument of numbers on her side. But this is by no means a definitive argument.
What legitimacy are the other candidates on the left able to oppose to him? In fact, democratic legitimacy, too: Yannick Jadot was appointed by a primary, Jean-Luc Mélenchon gathered more than seven million votes in 2017, and Anne Hidalgo was appointed by the PS, which is historically a major party. of government. But also, a programmatic legitimacy: some of these candidates have put on the table a set of specific proposals. Besides that, what is the backbone of the program carried by Christiane Taubira? Three words were hammered home during his victory speech: republic, justice, solidarity!
Add a few little flourishes to make the link – democracy, autonomy, freedoms – and here is the speech of Christiane Taubira. Note that all these occurrences were collected over seventeen short minutes of speech…
These words are obviously not insignificant: they are mobilizing concepts, that is to say pretty hollow and empty words, which speak to everyone, while saying nothing specific to anyone. But last night, Christiane Taubira was not content to mobilize beautiful concepts: she also took shelter behind big names: “These great figures are those of Jean Jaurès, those of Léon Gambetta, those of Léon Blum, those of Pierre Mendès France, that of François Mitterrand (…) I am thinking of Olympe de Gouges, Sophie de Grouchy and Condorcet, her ideals they are also those of Solitude, those of Aimé Césaire.” A gallery of portraits, therefore, of the great historical figures of the left, which certainly make it possible to mobilize the emotion of the listeners, in this case their enthusiasm, but do not constitute the beginning of the beginning of a proposal.
So, of course, Christiane Taubira is just beginning her campaign. But that is precisely the whole problem: we are at the end of January. She told us almost nothing about her concrete proposals. He has barely a few weeks left to: articulate them, present them to us, and succeed in imposing them. So, of course, it can claim the legitimacy of numbers. But is the number enough to base a speech and justify a candidacy? We will see it well: after all, the voters will decide.