The presidential rally season is open. A rarely spectacular image battle, which sees a few pawns move every week, sometimes unknown until then, on the political chessboard. Without knowing if these support committees really redefine political lines or if they prefigure post-presidential recompositions, which some, on the left, imagine as a moment of great turbulence.
Almost all candidates engage in the exercise, with varying degrees of success. Jean-Luc Mélenchon undoubtedly represents the most important pole of attraction. He is leading in the polls among left-wing candidates, and his rallies are always full. The rallies to his “parliament of the People’s Union”, which are serialized every week, are a tool in their own right in this “show of force” that the candidate of La France insoumise intends to lead.
A way, too, to send ultra-precise political signals. On January 22, the anti-species activist Aymeric Caron, at the head of the small Ecological Revolution for the Living party, announced his rallying in The Sunday newspaper. The following Monday, at a meeting in Bordeaux, Jean-Luc Mélenchon gave him pledges by proclaiming: “There will no longer be, in this country, farms that concentrate animals in unacceptable conditions, martyrs. »
“That’s not what makes the election”
Former Attac spokesperson, Aurélie Trouvé released a book in September 2021, The Rainbow Block (La Découverte), defining a strategy made up of “unwavering support between friendly causes and an unfailing determination once morest the camp of capital and fascism”. Now president of this People’s Union parliament, she denies that it is a cynical transfer window designed to serve an election. “Without the program it would be a cacophony, but with the program we have a score”, she explains.
On the side of environmentalists, we welcome some of the announcements with placidity. “This parliament is a campaign tool that absorbs people, in June it will no longer exist, sweeps away Hélène Hardy, head of elections and party relations at Europe Ecologie-Les Verts, that’s not what makes the election. » Other departures have a more bitter taste. The rallying of Claire Lejeune, former secretary general of the Young Ecologists, to the campaign of Jean-Luc Mélenchon, for example, touches on a sensitive point: the disagreement between the camp of Yannick Jadot and young militants for the climate concerned with radicalism, which preferred Sandrine Rousseau or Eric Piolle. “We will miss her” remarks Alain Coulombel, member of the executive board, whose line she shared.
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