A grassroots initiative aimed at finding a unity candidate among France’s leftist presidential hopefuls has only served to accentuate divisions, increasing the risk left-wing forces will fail to have an impact on the April vote.
A so called “people’s primary” on Sunday picked former justice minister Christiane Taubira as the favourite to lead the left’s efforts to unseat President Emmanuel Macron in the election.
A total of 392,000 people took part in the four-day online poll, a non-binding and unofficial enterprise organised by political activists including environmentalists, feminists and anti-racism groups.
Taubira, a long-time champion of the activist left, entered the contest as the favourite and emerged with the highest score on a scale from “very good” to “inadequate”.
The French Guiana-born left-winger, 69, was a progressive voice in former Socialist president Francois Hollande’s government and the driver behind the 2013 legalisation of same-sex marriage. She resigned after disagreeing with Hollande over anti-terror legislation.
Next in the primary rankings came the Green party’s Yannick Jadot, hard-left firebrand Jean-Luc Melenchon, and Euro MP Pierre Larrouturou.
In a new blow to her flagging campaign, Socialist Party candidate Anne Hidalgo, the mayor of Paris, trailed in fifth place.
“We want a united left, we want a strong left and we have a great road in front of us,” Taubira told activists after the result Sunday.
But the primary was in trouble from the start after Melenchon, Hidalgo and Jadot refused to have anything to do with it, or abide by its result.
Communist candidate Fabien Roussel said Monday he had no intention of backing Taubira who “has no election programme”.
– ‘Extremely disrespectful’ –
Some charged that the primary had always been designed to endorse Taubira, rather than serve as a vehicle for unity.
“This could have been a rallying moment for the entire left, but it turned out to be just another candidacy,” said Hidalgo.
Melenchon said of Taubira that “she is stepping into the shoes that were made for her” by the primary, adding that “none of this is my concern”.
Jadot simply stated that he had “nothing” to say to the primary winner.
Taubira said her rivals were “extremely disrespectful towards the people who organised this primary and those who chose to take part”.
But, she added, “the fact is that nearly half a million people decided to play a role in the campaign”, while deploring on Franceinfo radio the other candidates’ “haughty way to distance themselves from a democratic process”.
– ‘Confusion a little worse’ –
The primary turned out to be “civic success but a political failure”, said Gilles Finchelstein, head of the Fondation Jean Jaures, a think tank.
“The ambition to have a single candidate for the entire left is an illusion” because of the different strands involved, he told AFP.
Remi Lefebvre, a political scientist at Lille University, said the different candidates were “jockeying for position” over sometimes “small” differences.
“This crisis is making the confusion on the left a little worse,” he said.
Polls currently predict that all left-wing candidates will be eliminated in the first round of presidential voting in April.
Macron, who has yet to declare his candidacy for re-election, is favourite to win the first round, with the far-right’s Marine Le Pen or right-wing contender Valerie Pecresse expected to make the run-off vote two weeks later.
