Saturday 15 January 2022
Former Minister Taubira takes office
Macron faces new competition before elections
In polls, French President Macron is ahead of the presidential election in April. But he has new competition. Former Minister of Justice Christine Taubira wants to score points with voters on the issues of social justice, education and ecology.
Former justice minister Christine Taubira is running in the French presidential elections. The left-leaning politician announced her candidacy in Lyon and announced that she wanted to work primarily for social justice, environmental protection and young people. She wants to lead a government “that knows how to conduct a dialogue instead of moralizing and bullying,” said the 69-year-old.
Taubira, who is from French Guiana, was Minister of Justice under Socialist President François Hollande. In 2016 she resigned in the dispute over constitutional reform. After the attacks in Paris in November 2015, Hollande wanted to ensure that French people with dual citizenship could be deprived of their citizenship after they had been convicted of a terrorist offense. The constitutional amendment ultimately failed.
Taubira is also known in France as a committed advocate of gay marriage. She was also instrumental in establishing slavery as a crime against humanity. In 2002 she had already contested the presidential election, when she got 2.3 percent of the votes.
Polls for the April election point to President Emmanuel Macron’s re-election, although he has not yet officially announced his candidacy. The left camp was already completely fragmented before Taubira’s candidacy. All of the five left-wing candidates so far, including Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo and Leftist Jean-Luc Mélenchon, are below ten percent in the polls.