Here it is officially launched in the race of 2022. With one small detail.
“So, yes, I am ready and I propose my candidacy but there is a but!
I am asking for a popular nomination, so I will be a candidate if, and only if, I have collected 150,000 sponsorship signatures, ”said Jean-Luc Mélenchon, guest of the TF 1 newscast this Sunday, November 8.
A skill on the part of the deputy of Bouches-du-Rhône, sometimes accused of authoritarianism internally, which thus conditions his third participation in the presidential election to popular support.
In reality, it should be a formality for the one who had collected more than seven million votes in 2017, and whose movement La France Insoumise declared that more than 500,000 "sympathizers" were registered on its digital platform.
If this third candidacy for the queen election does not seem to be a surprise, the timing, him, questions.
Why so soon, when the country has its eyes turned to the United States or to the health and economic crisis linked to the Covid-1 9 epidemic?
The decision was not taken on a whim, since when it returned to school at the end of August, Camp Mélenchon had already announced a decision for the fall.
The interested party also believes that the long run is on his side.
“We have to build a positive majority
(…)
, but it only works if we convince, we need deadlines, we have always carried out long campaigns”, he recently justified.
Being an alternative to the Macron-Le Pen return match
Mélenchon thinks the time is right to raise his voice against Emmanuel Macron, caught up in criticism of his management of the health crisis.
He also hopes to reach the same level as the other candidate already declared for 2022: Marine Le Pen, who already imagines herself challenging Macron again in the second round.
To be a candidate already is to already be an alternative to this virtual return match, which a majority of French people hope to escape.
But to hope to remain so, he will also have to appear as the best candidate of the left.
From PS to EELV, via his own family, the potential suitors are already playing elbows.
Yannick Jadot street in the green stretchers, competed by the mayor of Grenoble Eric Piolle, when the mayor (PS) of Paris Anne Hidalgo lets resound the little music that gives her as a possible candidate of the united left in 2022. And this week, it was the former socialist minister Arnaud Montebourg who confirmed that he was ready for a new "engagement".
The same Montebourg that Mélenchon had tried to convince to join him, in vain, during the 2017 campaign, and which represents a direct threat to the Insoumis.
Put the left in front of the fait accompli
With this takeoff, more than seventeen months before the first round of the presidential election, in addition to the wind in the sails represented by its 150,000 “sponsorships”, collected on a platform called “We are for”, Mélenchon also wants put the rest of the left in the face of a fait accompli: in 2022, it will be no matter what.
Are they looking for a unique candidate?
He's already here!
Already 10,000 signatures on the platform https://t.co/BhiZMOj6Jh!
🟣 Continue to share with others! #NousSommesPour #JLMDirect # JT20h pic.twitter.com/vlBhX7r6kS
- We Are For (@NousSommesPour) November 8, 2020
Asked earlier on Sunday about the upcoming declaration of his former socialist comrade, François Hollande did not fail to scratch him.
“Does Jean-Luc Mélenchon have a program and a personality that allow him to be in the majority in our country?
I do not believe it ", estimated the former president on France 3." What matters is to embody the whole left.
This is not his case ”.
The image of Jean-Luc Mélenchon has been tarnished since the previous presidential election - in particular with the affair of the searches of his movement, in October 2018. In addition, making his personal candidacy an intangible datum for 2022 will allow him really to unite, or will it not split more?
This is the whole challenge.