How to relaunch his campaign less than three months before the first round of the presidential election? This is the question posed by Anne Hidalgo and her teams, who are struggling to take off in the polls. Thursday, the mayor of Paris, candidate of the Socialist Party, unveiled her program with 70 proposals. The columnist Nicolas Beytout sees it as a candidacy that fails to unite, and to distinguish itself on the left.
The presentation of Anne Hidalgo’s program on Thursday was to be an opportunity, a new opportunity, to relaunch the campaign of the official candidate of the Socialist Party. It was to be a media moment and the start of new debates. To be honest, it was to be the last chance for the mayor of Paris to get out of the molasses in which her campaign has been sinking since last September and, finally, to get people talking about her ideas, her proposals.
His camp more than ever divided
It had to, because not much happened. First, because Anne Hidalgo persisted in wanting to present her program when the media had something else to eat, with the education strike. When we want to make a media stunt, we try not to be covered by another stronger news. Especially since the teachers are the pool in which the PS traditionally recruits en masse, and it was even to them that she had made her first promise: the doubling of their salary, a promise since abandoned.
Result: Anne Hidalgo was booed, this is the first failure. The other is more worrying: when Anne Hidalgo was unrolling her proposals, we learned that the authorities of the Socialist Party were now deeply divided on her candidacy. It must be said that the candidate did what was necessary to disorient everyone: her surprise rallying to a popular primary that she had always refused, primary that she now rejects, makes her most fervent defenders dizzy.
The promise to double the salary of teachers abandoned
It is a “suicidal attitude”, said Thursday to Europe 1 a member of the management of the PS, who continues to bet that it will not hold until the end. The tastiest thing in all of this is that Anne Hidalgo chose as a campaign slogan: “Reuniting France”. Perhaps the best thing would be to start by gathering support.
Anne Hidalgo has dropped her flagship proposal to double teachers’ salaries to retain only the promise to bring their remuneration “to the level of that of executives”. It’s quite vague. For the rest, we are entitled to a series of classic left-wing proposals, that is to say largely oriented towards public spending and taxes. Of his 70 proposals, there are about twenty which consist of the distribution of more public money or the creation of taxes, duties or new constraints.
A candidacy significantly close to the Greens
All this while promising that the Europeans better behave, because the European Stability and Growth Pact will be replaced by a “progress” pact. Over-indebtedness is therefore supposed to be progress. No originality, in short, no vision that has the slightest chance of giving meaning to social democracy.
Ecology is an important part of its program. It is, according to her, “the fight of the century”. But on this subject, nothing really distinguishes it from the proposals of environmentalists, including on nuclear power since not only does it want to stop all new construction of power plants (large or small), but it wants to achieve 100% renewable energy “also quickly as possible”.
It’s vague, but it can be connected with the Greens, as can be its proposals for a citizens’ referendum, recognition of the white vote or the right to vote at 16 years old. So fitting that by force, we will end up wondering what use could this candidacy be, both so contested within the Socialist Party itself, and so little distinctive from the plethoric offer that the left, reduced to its most simple expression, continues to line up in the race for the Élysée.