About 20,000 socialist militants are called to vote tonight in their federations
The mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, starts as the favorite to win the candidacy of the French Socialist Party (PS) today for the presidential elections in April 2022, despite her poor performance in the polls.
His rival, former Agriculture Minister Stéphane Le Foll, has acknowledged that he has little to do with Hidalgo. Franco-Spanish politics, 62, has the support of party leaders, including the first secretary of the Socialist Party, Olivier Faure.
About 20,000 socialist militants are called to vote tonight in their federations. The final results are expected to be known at midnight.
Once she obtains the support of the party’s militants, Hidalgo will be officially invested as a candidate at a party convention that will take place on October 23 in Lille, the fiefdom of former Minister Martine Aubry, her political godmother.
The road from Hidalgo to the Elíseo Palace seems, however, uphill. The polls give him between 4 and 7% of voting intention in the first round, so he could not qualify for the second round. In 2017, the Socialist Party obtained 6.36% of the votes in the first round.
Many in the party dream of “a comeback,” a Spanish word used in football and politics in France. At the end of the day, at this point in 2017, Emmanuel Macron was not a candidate for the presidential elections nor was he in the polls of favorites for the Elysee.
Hidalgo could only go to the second round if he manages to unite the left parties around his candidacy, which, for now, does not seem easy, since both the ecologist Yannick Jadot and Jean-Luc Melénchon, president of La Francia Insumisa , are slightly ahead of her in polls.
The mayor of Paris announced in September that she was running for the Socialist presidential nomination. Hidalgo, who aspires to be the first president of France, did so with an environmentalist, social and feminist message.
Hidalgo, born in San Fernando (Cádiz) and raised in a working-class neighborhood of Lyon, emigrated with her family to France when she was two years old and became a French citizen at the age of 14.
Before dedicating herself to politics, she was a Labor Inspector and was in the cabinet of the Minister of Employment Martine Aubry, her godmother in the French Socialist Party. She has been mayor of Paris since April 2014.
With the socialist candidacy in his pocket, Hidalgo will travel to Valencia tomorrow to talk about ecology at the Congress of the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE). Hidalgo rules Paris with a broad left coalition that includes socialists, environmentalists and communists. And he boasts of having carried out a green revolution in Paris, where he has encouraged the use of bicycles and limited the speed of cars to 30 kilometers per hour.
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