On the third floor of a gray building in the heart of Paris, Elina Izzo (23) serves tea in a mug in the shape of the screaming face of Donald Trump. Behind her, couscous salad, humus, baguette and brie are laid out on a table. On the windows are posters with texts such as ‘We are the 99%’ and ‘The Victory in 2022’. In the room, two dozen people in their twenties and thirties sit concentrated on their laptops, watching and making phone calls.
Izzo and the others are volunteers for la Primary Popular, the haunted left-wing primary for the French presidential election in April. Traveling from Marseille to Paris, Izzo, together with 600 remote volunteers, forms a temporary call center in this space for technical questions about the online voting that runs from Thursday to Sunday.
The aim of the Primary Popular is to unite the deeply divided left-wing voters in France. At the moment there are seven left-wing presidential candidates, none of whom are more than 10 percent in the polls state, which excludes a place in the second round of the elections – let alone the Élysée.
“We really feel the urgency to act now,” says Izzo. She wears a thick green sweater and round glasses. “We don’t have years to think about climate issues and the rise of the far right also scares us. The Primary Popular is an opportunity to intervene.”
Also read: Macron uses European presidency as an electoral trump card
Boycotted by candidates themselves
Nearly half a million French people have registered for the primary to lead to greater unity on the left. But so far the Primary has mainly caused more division. Of the four most promising left-wing candidates – the far-left Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the green Yannick Jadot, the socialist Anne Hidalgo and the non-party Christiane Taubira – only the latter has promised to recognize the result of the primary.
Hidalgo, Jadot and Mélenchon have even said that the organizers of the Primary Popular should take their name off the list and that they will “be completely oblivious” to the outcome. Left-wing voters also seem unconvinced: according to a poll by TV channel RTL, half to understand that the most promising candidates do not want to participate.
Some of the resistance stems from doubts about the organizers’ intentions. According to opponents, they are not objective and they try to favor Taubira. This is underlined by a internal video from October that leaked last week, in which one of the organizers states that his goal is to prevent Hidalgo, Mélenchon and Jadot, among others, from getting the 500 signatures of mayors they need to stand for candidacy. Hidalgo said at France Info to be “shocked” by those images.
Robin Le Priol (28) – his curls tied up in a bun, a glittering ring in his ear – is spokesperson for the Primary Popular and denies this firmly. “We have never blocked those signatures and I find it unbelievable that people see us as anti-democratic. In fact, we give citizens the opportunity to express themselves about how they want to be represented,” he says, drinking coffee from a hard plastic cup in the call center.
lèse majesté
The fact that the organization refuses to take the names of the candidates who do not want to participate from the list has also caused bad blood. Like this said Mélenchon’s spokesman that the organizers have no respect “for the people involved in these presidential elections”.
Political scientist Rémi Lefebvre argues in an analysis in the online magazine AOC that “the organizers have opened a legitimacy conflict with the parties: who has the legitimacy to represent the left and nominate candidates?” This would make the classical parties feel attacked. Lefebvre even speaks of “lese majeste”. He argues that the initiators may have underestimated the size of this discussion and that they believe too strongly “that parties are nothing more than dead stars”. “We question an existing system,” says Le Priol. “That probably creates some resistance.”
Also read: France sees the specter of ‘woke’ and ‘Islamolinks’ everywhere
While Le Priol speaks, there is continuous movement in the space. Someone writes a thank you note from an elderly caller on a large flipchart that reads fais nous sourire (let’s smile), a couple is hugging on a couch, volunteers are walking in and out of the room. It is noticeable that almost all of them are young and highly educated: one is an engineer, the other has studied environmental management.
According to political scientist Lefebvre, this also applies to the electorate of the Primary Popular. “They are among the most politicized categories of the population, the only ones able to[online] to tame a procedure that is difficult for laymen to decipher,” he writes. According to him, it mainly concerns people from the ‘student world and social entrepreneurship, qualified inhabitants of cities and technophiles’.
If this is true – the organization does not collect data on voters’ location, age or education level – it means that the outcome of the left-wing primary is determined by only a small fraction of the electorate. Indeed, Le Priol thinks that “some categories of the population will be slightly over-represented,” but “no more than in other primaries.” Izzo points to a volunteer’s MacBook, which shows a virtual meeting with one participant with gray hair. “We are all young here, but you also see fewer young people on the screens.”
The call center will remain open until the online ballot box closes on Sunday afternoon. What happens if a candidate wins who does not recognize the primary, neither Le Priol nor Izzo can say. Le Priol says the winner – whoever that is – will be invited to a statement containing the values of the Primary Popular (on social justice, ecology and democracy). It may be that no one shows up, he knows. Izzo: “I think some candidates might change their minds.”