Popular primary: “We won a battle, now we must win the war” – Liberation

Nearly 200 people gathered in Paris on Saturday to demand a union of the left for the presidential election. Galvanized by the support of Anne Hidalgo this week, they urge the other candidates to take their responsibilities.

“Listen carefully, Yannick and Jean-Luc, it’s yes or it’s no!” Vianney Louvet, member of the Popular Primary office, shouts on the chorus from Angela’s song, on the stage set up for the occasion, Place de la République in Paris. About 200 people, mostly young people, dance in front of him this Saturday afternoon. They came to support, in the capital as in several cities of France, this citizen movement which has set itself the ambition to unite the left for the presidential election. Extensive program.

So far shunned by the parties, the Popular Primary, despite its 260,000 online signatories, remained inaudible. Everything has changed with the turnaround of the socialist candidate Anne Hidalgo, who announced Thursday in the 8 p.m. newspaper of TF1, to be favorable the organization of a primary on the left, before announcing its participation, 24 hours later on LCI. And this after hammering the opposite for months, just like Arnaud Montebourg.

“Stop playing idiots!”

“We were excited, finally someone could hear us”, testifies the spokesperson of the movement, Samuel Grzybowski. The 29-year-old is more serious: “We won a battle, now we have to win the war.” Understand: convince the environmental candidate, Yannick Jadot, and that of the rebels, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, to join, in turn, the primary. “Jadot will bend, internal pressure will be unbearable ”, believes the spokesperson. At the same time, at the first meeting of the green candidate, in Laon (Aisne), the ecologist Sandrine Rousseau opened the door to discussions to get together: “It would be good if she joined us, that would be the meaning of the story”.

Sonia Pallas, a 51-year-old engineer, interrupts the feminist song she sang with the crowd to tell about the hope she has found. “I was surprised by Hidalgo’s announcement. After, she’s so low in the polls, that it is also in his interest ”, she notes. It is all the left which would find its account in this union, estimates the activist. For now, no candidate on the left exceeds 10% in opinion polls. The engineer made an hour’s drive with her daughter to inflate the crowd, which she regrets “not many” : “When your 14-year-old daughter tells you that she is afraid of the extreme right, you want to say: ‘Forget your logic as politicians.'”

“Stop playing idiots!” resumes, more directly, Hugo Viel. The 23-year-old activist signed with 500 young people committed to the climate a platform this Saturday in Release to call on candidates from the left and environmentalists to come together. “Divided, you will not have our vote”, they write. “I don’t care who’s in power, I just want our values ​​to be. Stop shouting in the void for the climate in the demonstrations ”, insists the young man, holding up his sign “End of the world, end of the month, same fight.”

Christiane Taubira, the providential woman?

All afternoon, a murmur will have gone through the crowd, in the name of Christiane Taubira. With 67% of good opinions, the former Minister of Justice is, by far, the favorite personality of all supporters of the left, according to the Odoxa-Mascaret poll for Obs published Friday. Rose Mariaud and Tom Durand hardly dare to dream of it. “Others are selfish. She is less in the parties, much more human. And it’s a woman! ” enthusiastically the two 21-year-old roommates, communication students. The response of the providential woman on her participation, or not, in the People’s Primary is expected, according to her supporters, in mid-December. An online vote will decide between the candidates in January. Christiane Taubira is in the “top 10” of the personalities chosen (without having asked to participate) by the voters on October 11, and whose names will be submitted to the final vote.

At 54, Isabelle is ready to abstain, for the first time, if each candidate from the left decides to go on her own. “I am not politicized, but what I understand is that they reason at the level of their party, and not of the country”, regrets the school teacher, who came from Val-de-Marne. Macron, Pécresse, Le Pen, Zemmour: everything is the same for her. So Isabelle devotes all her free time to Popular Primary. Utopian? Naive? “It’s mostly the only option. We must do everything we can to avoid the massacre. “