France Analysis

French Left divisions deepen ahead of April presidential elections

Unable to unite around a single candidate for France’s presidential elections in April, France’s profoundly divided broad Left faces a trouncing at the polls. Its stand-alone candidates were joined at the weekend by Christiane Taubira, an icon for some among the socialist movement, whose bid threatens to further splinter the leftwing vote. Fabien Escalona and Mathilde Goanec report.

Fabien Escalona and Mathilde Goanec

This article is freely available.

In a widely expected move, Christiane Taubira, a former justice minister in François Hollande’s socialist government, on Saturday announced her bid to run as a candidate for the Left in France’s presidential elections due in April.

It brings the number of principal contenders for the leftwing vote to four, although current opinion surveys tip none of them to reach the final second-round playoff in the elections, when the choice will be between two candidates, which the same surveys predict will include Emmanuel Macron, whose expected re-election bid is still unconfirmed.

With all those on the Left apparently trailing behind voting intentions for the conservative candidate Valérie Pécresse and far-right candidate Marine Le Pen (and also maverick far-right candidate Eric Zemmour), the confirmation of Taubira’s entry into the ring was unwelcome for the Socialist Party (PS) candidate, Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo, who on Sunday told rolling news channel BFMTV that it was “bad news” and created “confusion”.

Also speaking on Sunday, Sandrine Rousseau, who heads the political committee for the EELV Green party candidate Yannick Jadot, told radio station France Info that Taubira’s bid was yet “one more candidature for the Left and I think we didn’t have need of it”.   

Taubira, 69, will take part in a so-called Primaire Populaire , or “people’s primary”, to be held online later this month, and which was initially created by a self-declared “independent” association of the leftwing electorate to choose a single presidential candidate to represent France’s profoundly divided broad Left.

Illustration 1
Christiane Taubira announcing her election bid in Lyon, January 15th 2022. © Jean-Philippe Ksiazek / AFP

But the primary has itself caused further divisions, with Jadot and the radical-left La France Insoumise (LFI) party leader and candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the leading candidates on the Left, both refusing to recognise its legitimacy. Meanwhile, Hidalgo, who previously urged all her leftwing rivals to take part in it, has now also said she will ignore the result of the primary if, as is likely, she is not the winner.

Despite refusing to recognise the eventual result, all three will be included in the list of seven names submitted for the online vote, which 120,000 people have now registered for, to be held between January 27th and 30th. The other four are Taubira and outsiders Anna Agueb-Porterie, Pierre Larrouturou, Charlotte Marchandise-Franquet.

Taubira is a veteran figure of the French Left, who served as a Member of Parliament (MP) for a constituency in her native French Guiana from 1993 to 2012, when she was appointed justice minister by newly elected Hollande, and for many years was a Member of the European Parliament. She was one of very few black women to serve in government in France, and as the champion of the same-sex marriage legislation that was introduced in May 2013 she became a regular target of the rightwing opposition, but earned the admiration of a section of the French Left.

It was in the historic Croix-Rousse quarter of the south-east city of Lyon that Taubira confirmed her bid on Saturday, speaking before a gathering of several hundred people on the esplanade of a climbing road called the “Grande-Côte”.

It was a symbolic choice. The ‘Great Slope’, the road that leads up above the city, was once the heart of a vast centre of silk manufacturing workshops, and in the 19th century it was the scene of successive major revolts by the silk weavers – called “canuts” in French – in protest over poor pay and conditions. Taubira paid homage to the “canuts”, who in their first uprising in 1831 gained control of Lyon before it was recaptured by the army, saying that their history “still today gives flesh and sense to the democratic and social [French] republic”.

But for those who doubt Taubira’s capacity to connect with the blue-collar electorate, the symbolism was double-edged; the slopes and plateau of the quarter, listed as a UNESCO World Heritage site, are today a prime example of the gentrification of Lyon’s population, which since the 1990s has seen the middle classes and the wealthy move in and property prices rise to the exclusion of the less well-off.

She said she was standing in the presidential election “For a government that respects us”, and “For a government of great democracy, rid of any monarchical fantasies”.  She began her short speech with references to the “anger” and the “sufferings” of many, proposing “another style of government” in contrast to the solitary exercise of presidential power.

Taubira also underlined her experience in government as justice minister during the 2012-2017 presidency of François Hollande (she left her post in January 2016), including during the succession of murderous terrorist attacks in France in 2015 when, she said, she was to know “what it is like to find oneself in a defence council [meeting], to be obsessed about the security of the French people, but also to maintain our cohesion, attentive to protecting the most exposed citizens”.

But while Taubira won admiration from many on the Left during her time in office, notably for her defence of the same-sex marriage legislation, one of the rare progressist reforms under Hollande, she also came under fire from a section of the Left for having remained too long in the government of prime minister Manuel Valls, which Socialist Party leftwingers regarded as betraying its principles.

Her speech, relayed live on social media where it attracted a modest following of around 3,000, Taubira unveiled, albeit partially, four of the key elements of her future manifesto, prepared by her and her team since December.

These included making young people “the first major line” of policy attention, including providing the over-18s who are ineligible to receive minimum welfare payments with a monthly 800 euros over a period of five years, essentially to ease the financial difficulties for higher education students, a proposition largely shared by other candidates on the Left.

She said she would remove inequalities in schools, which she called the “beating heart of the [French] republic”, but gave few details of the form this would take apart from one quite politically risky pledge. This was to enforce what is called “la carte scolaire” (schooling map) system regarding private schools which receive state subsidies (and which adopt the national curriculum). The “carte scolaire” sets out the choice of schools to which pupils can enrol, contained in a given geographical area close to their homes. Presently, parents can avoid sending their children to a local state-run school by placing them in a private establishment even when this is outside of the designated area.

Another priority of her programme is “social justice”. She pledged to raise the minimum legal wage (for a 35-hour working week) to a net monthly sum of 1,400 euros (compared to the current net sum of 1,269 euros) which, again, is a proposition largely shared by other leftwing candidates. She also promised a review of wage scales across all companies with the organisation, under her “direct authority”, of a “conference on salaries” which would begin as of her arrival in power. “Those who do not want to revalue salaries will no longer benefit from public aid or tax exonerations,” she said.

Taubira outlined her proposed fiscal reforms, which include a rise in tax for households with a minimum wealth of 10 million euros that would, she said, bring a yearly extra sum of 10 billion euros into the state’s coffers. That however, would fall short of paying for other measures she presented on Saturday. Meanwhile, she gave no details of her plans on corporate taxation, nor on the subject of relations between the capital markets, the state, and business.

On social justice issues, Taubira on several occasions placed her proposed reforms within the framework of European Union (EU) legislation, while conceding that a “battle” would have to be engaged. One example here was her intention to rein-in the gig economy, when she referred to the proposals by the European Commission (EC) last December to regulate the conditions of those working for digital labour platforms to allow them labour law rights and social benefits. If the principle of this is a simple one, namely to impose a legal presumption of employment status for those working for the platforms, which currently treat them as self-employed, the EC proposals would not be legally binding before another three or four years, and depend upon the agreement of all of the EU’s 27 member states.

Similarly, among Taubira’s propositions on “ecological transition”, which she presented as another policy priority, some would require gaining EU acceptance, notably that of removing VAT from organic farming produce. In what are hardly controversial proposals, she spoke of de-carbonising the economy, of reducing pollution and encouraging ‘green’ mobility, while remaining vague on the methods by which these would be obtained.    

Taubira concluded her speech with the subject of the institutions and character of France’s republican state, “indivisible” and “secular”, in which the plurality of society and the singularity of each citizen would be recognised and respected – highlighting the xenophobic and identarian interpretation of “la République” in which many across the political sphere have become shackled.

She referred to her own origins in French Guiana, growing up in “France’s worldwide territory”, and underlining what “languages and cultures bring to a common patrimony”. Vowing to defend the institutions and values of the state from attacks of any sort, Taubira immediately followed that up with the comment that such intransigeance was required against “all types of discriminations, these bite-wounds which affect the heart and the mind”.

With the announcement of her candidature, the situation for the Left ahead of this April’s elections appears increasingly ironic. While Taubira declared in December that she would not become just “one more candidate”, that is precisely what could be the case if she emerges victorious in the forthcoming “Popular primaries” – and whose very purpose is supposedly to unite the Left.

Taubira’s arrival on the scene was apparently encouraged by the Socialist Party candidate Anne Hidalgo who, after suddenly calling late last year for a primary contest between all the candidates on the Left, including the Greens – widely interpreted as a “get-out” card in face of her poor showing in opinion polls – has now declared her intention of continuing with her own bid, alone, “right up to the end”.

As Mediapart reported last week, there is disquiet among some Socialist Party officials at the less than 5% of voting intentions Hidalgo is credited with in current opinion surveys (and which place her neck-and-neck with Taubira).          

In an interview on Saturday evening with public broadcaster France 2, Taubira ducked tougher questions about the cross-Left primaries, which she described as being “indispensable”, the rules of which have changed since it was first mooted, and which will most likely fail in its purpose.

Taubira’s speech on Saturday, and statements by Hidalgo last week, show that their separate policy programmes are in fact largely similar, while there are clear differences in substance and culture between them and the ‘political ecology’ of EELV Green party candidate Yannick Jadot and the ‘red-green’ radical-left candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon.

For the socialists, the arsenal Hidalgo can count upon is a ready-established infrastructure for leading a political campaign, funding, and the certainty of attracting the 500 mayoral endorsements required of each candidate (a controversial legal requirement initially introduced to exclude marginal or eccentric bids). Matching that in a very short time will be a significant challenge for Taubira in the event that she wins the primaries at the end of this month.

The centre-left, still reeling from the consequences of François Hollande’s presidential term, which saw it collapse in the presidential and legislative elections of 2017, now faces further suffering if the multiple candidates hoping to represent it stay in the race. That situation, however, will bring comfort to Jadot and Mélenchon over their decision to remain outside of the primaries process and its never-ending developments.

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  • The original French version of this report can be found here.

English version, with some additional reporting, by Graham Tearse