While the elected officials of France Insoumise urge him to support Jean-Luc Mélenchon, Fabien Roussel continues his campaign. The Communist presidential candidate thus played the card of rurality and the proximity debate Wednesday evening in Auvergne.
Among the 300 people who came to squeeze in the small multipurpose room of Billom, near Clermont-Ferrand, a large majority of long-time PCF activists. They hope that their party, in electoral decline for several decades, regains its former glory. In 2012 and 2017, the party supported the leader of the Insoumis.
The PCF wants to “rebuild national credibility”
Before the intervention of the candidate, it is the local Communist deputies, André Chassaigne and Jean-Paul Dufrègne, who answer the questions. Then, Fabien Roussel launches out by recounting his visit, a few hours earlier, to the Clermont-Ferrand Breeding Show. He took the opportunity to propose to organize “by sector, each year, conferences between producers and large distribution, with intervention of the State in the event of too low prices”. He also wants the redevelopment of public services in the territories or even a major plan for “construction of rural housing”.
Its “happy rurality” means “irrigating the territories” rather than the “concentration” of the model of “neoliberal competition” in the metropolises. However, starting your campaign with agriculture goes against the traditional image of the workers’ party. But “the left, it can not be that in the big metropolises”, explains Ian Brossat, director of campaign, which recalls that “the municipal establishment of the PCF is in an overwhelming way in the rurality”. It now remains to “rebuild national credibility,” adds the deputy PCF to the mayor of Paris Anne Hidalgo.
“Nationalize Axa”
The challenge is great: Fabien Roussel is given between 1 and 4% in the polls. On the niche of the radical left, the national secretary of the PCF is therefore doing everything to cultivate his difference with Jean-Luc Mélenchon. For example, it develops the themes of security, nuclear power that it wants to promote, secularism to be defended and therefore rurality. He is also opposed to Yannick Jadot and his “societal measures”. Organic, ban on pesticides, break with productivist agriculture, animal welfare: “This revolution must not be imposed on farmers, it must happen by them”, scolds Fabien Roussel.
However, it is on the most eagerly awaited theme of salaries that it collects the loudest applause from the room: the minimum wage “at 1,800 euros gross and not the 1,500 euros net of the insurer Xavier Bertrand who wants you to be insured by private ! We are Social Security ”. He continued a little later under the watchful eye of Georges Marchais’ son, Olivier, a member of the campaign team: “I want to nationalize Axa. And that in terms of radicalism, there is a pair of shareholders who will feel it pass ”. To see now in the next polls if this strategy is paying off.