“Coming here is already winning”.
François Hollande emphatically greeted the socialist candidate for the next presidential election Anne Hidalgo, who came to campaign this Saturday in Tulle in the Corrézien stronghold of the former president.
"That's why I'm here," replied the mayor of Paris.
Under the sun, we witnessed a kind of "handover", when Anne Hidalgo tries to give yet another boost to a presidential campaign that is struggling to take off.
The mayor of Paris is poorly placed in the polls where she vegetates around 5% of voting intentions?
"It's a very good sign," said François Hollande, himself far from being a favorite before finishing at the Elysee Palace in 2012, during a visit to the Tulle market.
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Between stalls of cheeses, meats and other sellers of early vegetables, the duo appeared in front of the press for a family photo, but also, according to Anne Hidalgo, "to hear and get rich" in contact with the 15,000 inhabitants of the city of which François Hollande was the mayor between 2001 and 2008. “How are you?
", " How are you ?
"," Are the children okay?
»: At his home in Tulle, where he owns a house, the former president was very comfortable in the streets he knows by heart.
"Yes, I will go all the way!
".
The candidate, always accompanied by the former president, will be present on Saturday evening at the Fête de la Rose in Malemort, a village near Brive-la-Gaillarde, after a signing session in the afternoon at the Fair of Book of Brive.
In the meantime, François Hollande has given him advice. “There are cycles. It is not the same thing to be in the media space several months before the ballot and to be a candidate ”, he notably judged, directly targeting the putative extreme right candidate Éric Zemmour, very present in the media. For him, "the French are not yet in the choice, but in the gaze" of what is happening, "sufficiently mature and aware of the issues not to put themselves in the perspective" of electing a populist candidate in next april. But he still considered “worrying” the “themes used, the sentences pronounced and the provocations made” in the electoral campaign.
To succeed in his campaign, he advises Anne Hidalgo to create "the force which will allow the French to give themselves the prospect of alternation".
The candidate assures him: "We have had difficult years: the PS collapsed after the presidential election in 2017 but the great idea that we carry in my family of thought, social democracy, is there".
Convinced that she can straighten the bar in the polls, the mayor of Paris insisted, determined: "Yes, I will go to the end!"
".