PUTU. The NPA candidate arrives in the last of this 1st round of the presidential election. Philippe Poutou will have to evaluate his result with regard to his two previous participations.
Is Philippe Poutou’s result in the 1st round of the 2022 presidential election better than during these previous participations? The leader of the NPA obtains 0.7% of the vote this Sunday, April 10. A score to be compared with the 1.09% of the vote obtained 5 years ago, but also with the 1.12% of 2012. With 268,695 voters who trusted him, he finished penultimate in the election, ahead of Nathalie Arthaud (out of 12 candidates), which was predictable for this candidate who preaches an anti-capitalist break and a revolutionary program. It should be noted that the dynamics of the useful vote on the left benefited the candidacy of Jean-Luc Mélenchon (22%) to the detriment of the other candidates from the same political side, including to the detriment of the NPA candidate. Philippe Poutou called for “don’t let a voice go to the far right” without giving any other voting instructions.
“We were not cut out to resist the pressure of the useful vote” admitted Philippe Poutou in the introduction to his speech on Sunday April 10, after the results of the first round. He returned to the difficulties encountered during the campaign, from the “difficulty of appearing in the media” (in particular with the refusal to debate several candidates and the problem of speaking time) to that of “collecting the 500 sponsorships”. He welcomed the inclusion by his party of considerations and social struggles such as police violence or the monopolization of the media by the “great fortunes”, but also of some of his public interventions in the campaign. , like his remarks on Eric Zemmour during his appearance on the program “Elysée 2022”, on the set of France 2.
He then repeated that the change would be “from below”, in “break with this system” and that social issues were more and more “prevalent”. He undertook to carry out a reconstruction project for the “working classes”, before citing the “recent progress” jumbled up: the mobilization of yellow vests, the movements against the pension reform, but also the strikes which broke out in the factories. He then gave his views on the future of the left. In the same way as the other candidates on the left, he is looking for the “union” of the social camp and its organizations to “cope”. Finally, he concluded on the urgency of building a “common front” on the left by coordinating with the parties around a “unitary program” which would result in a “party for all the exploited and the dominated”, without specify the parties to which he wishes to turn.
“Eric Zemmour will have served to put into perspective the danger represented by Marine Le Pen” when she has “never been so close to power”. He insisted on recalling that the two represented the “face of the same ultra-authoritarian political project” aimed at bringing “the whole population” into line, even calling Marine Le Pen “poison”. He asked his supporters to reject the “mortal danger” of voting for Marine Le Pen, “especially for immigrants and LGBT people”. Philippe Poutou was therefore clear about the RN: “not a voice should go to the far right”. However, he did not give voting instructions to Emmanuel Macron, whom he considers an “arsonist firefighter” whose policies are the “cause” of the rise of the RN. “It is not a republican front led by Emmanuel Macron that we need”, he recalled, but a “popular mobilization” against “all forms of oppression”. He calls for mobilization in working-class neighborhoods, businesses and young people to “protest” against the “imposed duel” in the second round.