“She is the best candidate” for some, “we feel that it does not take” for others. In Guadeloupe, Anne Hidalgo’s campaign continues under the radar.
During her trip, the candidate, credited with between 1.5 and 3% of voting intentions, went to the bedside of caregivers at the University Hospital, met elected officials, actors from the economic world, organic farmers, women of influence, and visited the Museum dedicated to slavery.
Marker of this four-day trip, which should then take her to Martinique, the public meeting at the end of the afternoon on Saturday in Basse-Terre brought together only a hundred people in a 250-seat room.
8,000 flyers had yet been distributed, but fears linked to the virus were the strongest, explains Olivier Nicolas, the First Secretary of the Socialist Federation of Guadeloupe.
Anne Hidalgo “has a reputation in the West Indies”, he assures, “because she is mayor of Paris” and “Paris is a large overseas city”, with in particular 6,000 city officials from overseas.
But “Guadeloupe is recovering from three months of generalized brothel”, and is still under a state of health emergency, while more than half of the population is not vaccinated, he recalls. “It changes the nature of ultramarine images. Chirac who kissed comforters, it no longer exists”.
Result, with the curfew still in effect, “anything that looks like popular gatherings” is not successful. “There is war only the carnival which attracts, and still”.
“Your presence is courage”, declared to the militants the senator of Guadeloupe and ex-minister of Overseas Victorin Lurel, acknowledging that it was “very difficult to mobilize”.
But for Olivier Nicolas, the presidential elections do not mobilize in Guadeloupe. In 2017, the participation rate was 40%. “The only elections that interest are the municipal ones”.
Land long acquired by the PS (72% of Guadeloupeans had voted Holland in 2012), Guadeloupe now has only five socialist municipalities out of 32 (but also various allied municipalities on the left), and the party recently lost the department, after the region .
“We remain the main party, but we are weakened. It’s a real crisis, there is not enough strong conviction, there have been a lot of defections”, analyzes Senator Victorin Lurel.
– “combat land” –
“But socialism is not a dirty word,” he insists. “We will campaign,” he promised. “I did it for Benoit Hamon, even though I knew it was desperate”.
In 2017, Benoit Hamon, who suffered from a large notoriety deficit in the West Indies, obtained 9.95% of the votes in the first round, where Emmanuel Macron and Jean-Luc Mélenchon came out on top.
Gary Galipo, 32, an activist for three years, is convinced by Anne Hidalgo. “For me she is the best candidate”, explains the one who does not “trust the polls”. “I am a socialist, I prefer to follow this left than Mélenchon”, he assures.
For Rémy Bourgeois, 60, who came at the invitation of his socialist brother-in-law, “Anne Hidalgo is a candidate in difficulty. I don’t know if at 1.5% of the voting intentions we can continue”.
“However, my ideas are on the left”, he says, “but we feel that it doesn’t take”, he adds, saying to himself “deeply sad to see how the party has gone adrift”, so that he “has served France well”. “But it’s too divided. It needs an overhaul.”
Anne Hidalgo in her speech called on campaigners “not to be brainwashed by those who say the chips are down” in this election. “Politics is not just about clicking, it’s about meeting, it’s about exchanging, about looking,” she insisted.
“As long as we are standing, as long as there are women and men who are going to fight for our values, as long as there is this energy, there is an extraordinary basis of hope there”, has she assured.
And for Albert, who came to listen to her, “she used the right words. She has a good speech, serene, soothing. It can go up”.