The far left candidate for the presidential election Philippe Poutou “is not reassured” for his sponsorships. He denounces this Friday a “political problem” with an “increasingly assumed anti-democratic side”. According to him, there is a “risk” that “more and more elected officials will reject sponsorship”.
With 146 sponsorships registered by the Constitutional Council, “we are not behind compared to five years ago, but we are not reassured for all that because the situation, we do not control it”, complained on RMC the candidate of the New Anticapitalist Party (NPA).
The municipal councilor of Bordeaux criticized “the sponsorship bank” set up by François Bayrou (Modem). The latter announced on Thursday the creation of a site offering mayors to sponsor candidates on condition that the latter “reach 10% in the polls”.
Poutou once morest the Bayrou system
Polled at around 1%, Philippe Poutou is firmly opposed to this system: “They don’t have the right to do that in fact, it has nothing to do with the polls, it has nothing to do with the scores that we can make, and there we are on sponsorship instructions, ”he lamented.
“We also see the anti-democratic side, which is more and more accepted in the end: the election must be between the big teams, between those who are favorites in the polls and then the little ones no longer count, and that is said openly, and that I think is a political problem, ”warned Philippe Poutou.
The NPA candidate had qualified for the first round of the presidential election in 2012 and 2017, collecting respectively 572 and 573 sponsorships. Mr. Poutou obtained 1.15% of the votes cast in 2012, or more than 411,000 votes, and 1.2% of the votes in 2017, or nearly 400,000 votes.
A “problem” for Nicolas Dupont-Aignan
Another candidate, sovereignist Nicolas Dupont-Aignan, also criticized the solution proposed by François Bayrou on Friday. The president of Debout la France estimated on France 2 that François Bayrou had certainly “finally understood that there was a problem” but wondered “in the name of what it is the majority who will choose their opponents”, judging this “extravagant”.
Nicolas Dupont-Aignan, who assures that he is only missing 30 sponsorships (the Constitutional Council has validated 260 for the time being), estimated that “there is a real danger for our democracy” with this system of sponsorships while the “mayors are afraid of the pressures of intermunicipalities, political parties”.
