Admittedly, you didn’t have to be a great cleric to guess that after the publication of the results of the popular Primary on Sunday evening, the situation on the left with a view to the presidential election was not going to be simplified as if by magic. And, in fact, neither Anne Hidalgo, nor Jean-Luc Mélenchon, nor Yannick Jadot rallied to the panache of the candidate widely designated by this citizens’ initiative: Christiane Taubira. The former Minister of Justice received the mention “good +” during this vote by “majority judgment”. Almost 200,000 of the 400,000 people who actually voted between Thursday and Sunday even gave the mention “very good” to Christiane Taubira.
Spokesperson for the Popular Primary, Mathilde Imer, “welcomes having succeeded in this sequence of voting with popular momentum” but does not release the pressure for all that, explaining that it is only a stage. “Our goal is to promote ecology and social justice. There, there was a membership vote, including for Yannick Jadot and Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who had more than 50% favorable opinion. We want this team to be created and we are calling on Christiane Taubira to work in this direction, ”explains Mathilde Imer, well aware that it is not won.
Welcome to 2002
As such, moreover, the course of the Sunday evening was “passable”, to use one of the mentions offered to voters for each of the candidacies. Firstly because one of the candidates for the Popular Primary, Anne Agueb-Porterie (mention “insufficient” on Sunday), announced that she supported Jean-Luc Mélenchon – and not the winner of the primary. “We regret his decision,” says Mathilde Imer dryly, who says she had no contact with the candidate on Monday.
And for her part, Christiane Taubira forgot to mention her competitors in her speech on Sunday evening, and spoke of the presidential election of “2002” instead of 2022. All this could have given an air of unpreparedness to a campaign to which we already reproaches his delay. Never mind, for Olivia Fortin, spokesperson for the winner, who is full of praise for the popular Primary and finds the result “exciting”. The hiccups? Nothing serious, because “in any case, nothing is decided. Very clever who can say what will happen in the coming weeks. From now on, “everyone will have to position themselves”, wants to believe the elected Marseille. “Yesterday, Christiane Taubira recognized all the legitimacy of the other candidacies. But it is the legitimacy of each in relation to his own shop. [Avec la Primaire populaire], we are in something bigger. »
Faced with this, at Yannick Jadot – who received a phone call from the former deputy of Guyana on Monday – we seem to remain rather calm. And without regrets, while the environmental candidate obtained an honorable score by ranking second in the vote. And if he had been, couldn’t he have won? “We have always been very clear: we do not want to ignore an environmental candidacy for the 2022 presidential election,” repeats spokesperson Benjamin Lucas. There is, however, a certain softening, after the very harsh words used to describe the popular Primary in recent weeks. This Monday, the elected official from Hauts-de-France says he has “no contempt” for the process and recognizes “the sincerity” of the voters. As if it were also a question of not insulting the future: Benjamin Lucas also believes that anything can happen in this campaign “for good or bad”… But repeats that it will not go until a withdrawal from Yannick Jadot.
The primary of the polls
The strongest pressure is anyway on Anne Hidalgo, whose strategic mistakes have bogged down the campaign. As a result, while she contributed to the popular success of the eponymous primary by joining it at the end of 2021, she only finished 5th in the consultation with the mention “passable +”, behind the related socialist MEP Pierre Larrouturou. A snub. Even a knockout? The future will tell. In recent weeks, at the PS, there seemed to be two lines: those who follow the candidate in their refusal to take into account the result of the primary, and the others, who, around the leadership of the PS, still gave it a importance. Like the number two of the PS, Corinne Narassiguin, who had welcomed the number of registered and registered and indicated that she was part of it.
This Monday, during the national office of the PS, the first secretary Olivier Faure wanted to recall that “the Socialist Party and the candidate Anne Hidalgo, it is the same thing”, as tweeted the national secretary for the elections of the party, Pierre Jouvet. Having to remind him was a mark of the malaise that reigns within the party, where there has been little talk lately and whose candidate has been well below 5% for weeks. If Christiane Taubira were to steal some more voting intentions from her, would maintaining Anne Hidalgo’s candidacy really be politically possible?
The day after the popular Primary, it is actually the “real primary” which seems to begin: that of the polls. “Christiane Taubira’s approach has been legitimized by the Popular Primary and will give it tremendous momentum,” believes Olivia Fortin. But what is tremendous momentum if not a noticeable rise in the polls in the days to come? A Christiane Taubira who would approach Jean-Luc Mélenchon and distance Yannick Jadot and Anne Hidalgo could open the door to a clarification. And therefore to disclaimers. “Of course, the polls are important. Everyone looks at them, recognizes Olivia Fortin. But the real indicator is the primary. Everything leads us to believe that it will be quite the opposite.