“Libé” returns to meet the French men and women who made the news in our columns to talk about the election. Today, Sandra Demarcq, national secretary of Solidaires finances publics, who criticizes the lack of time given to social issues in this campaign.
The McKinsey affair has become a fixture in the campaign since the publication of a Senate report on the influence of private consulting firms on public policy. So when we meet Sandra Demarcq, national secretary of Solidaires finances publics (SFP), a union for the defense of public services made up of agents whose job is to collect public funds, we can’t help but ask her what she thinks about it all. “We feel anger, but not really surprise because this government has the will to say that civil servants are no longer useful, she asserts in her office in eastern Paris. It’s public money thrown away for the benefit of private interests, with a firm that does not even pay its taxes in France.”
“Not everyone was lucky enough to have communist parents”
We had met Sandra Demarcq near the Saint-Sulpice church in the spring of 2021. She was one of the hundred public finance officers mobilized against the closings of tax centers and for better working conditions. The inter-union (Solidaires, CGT, Force Ouvrière, CFDT and CFTC) had previously drafted a platform of 50 demands. A year later, and as the presidential campaign for the first round ends in a few days, she regrets that nothing has changed: “There is no reflection on what a public finance department should be. We can pay our taxes in a tobacco shop and that doesn’t seem to shock anyone…” She continues: “Apart from Mélenchon and the far left, we have not heard a single word about a fundamental reform of tax and taxation, while at the same time income tax is less and less progressive . Most candidates are demagogic, saying that we pay too much tax. But we forget to say why we pay for it, for public services, social benefits, health…”
“Most of the topics covered in this campaign are completely disconnected from what the majority of the population is going through, said the union representative. We don’t even really know what all or most of the candidates are wearing on social issues.” We understand anger behind her smiles, in particular towards the proposals of the far right, Valérie Pécresse and Emmanuel Macron, whom she criticizes for not having finally drawn any consequences from the Covid-19 pandemic on the question. public services, in particular the health sector.
His wrath has its roots in his youth. Sandra Demarcq, 50, grew up in an environment conducive to the desire to fight that she still has today. “Not everyone was lucky enough to have communist parents!” she laughs. She says she spoke with them very early on about social injustice and inequality. So when she enrolls in history college to study the labor movement, “The second thing I did, right after paying my registration fees, was to go unionize!”
“Without mobilization and struggles, we get nothing”
A path that she pursues when she enters the labor market where, in her call center subcontractor of France Telecom, she creates a Solidarity section, affiliated with SUD PTT. “Being unionized in the private sector, which is more in a small box, is more difficult because the risk of being burdened is much greater. But it helps me in my trade unionism today.” After a few years of unemployment, she passed the competition and entered public finance. And joins SFP in stride. She also joined the Revolutionary Communist League (LCR) in 1999, was even part of the leadership of the New Anti-Capitalist Party (NPA) at the start of the movement created ten years later and on Olivier Besancenot’s list during the regional elections in 2004. If she remains a member, she is mainly there to talk about her union commitment, which is why we met her in May 2021.
Talkative and even sometimes lyrical when she recounts her struggles, Sandra Demarcq refuses to say who she will vote for, given her mandate as national secretary at Solidaires finances publics. She concedes, however, and unsurprisingly, that the conservative arc from Macron to the far right does not find favor in her eyes. But no matter which candidate wins in two weeks, including Jean-Luc Mélenchon, she predicts: “Whoever wins, we will be in the street. It is not a question of recognizing or not the legitimacy of the ballot, but we have the example of the Popular Front: without mobilization and struggles, we obtain nothing. Or how to remember that democracy does not stop at the single ballot.