"Coming here is already winning," says François Hollande to the socialist candidate Anne Hidalgo, who came to campaign this Saturday in Tulle in the Corrézien stronghold of the former president.

"That's why I'm here," replied the mayor of Paris, still struggling in the polls for 2022.

Under the sun, the former head of state wishes to bring his "support" to Anne Hidalgo, "a passing of the baton" as she tries to give yet another boost to a presidential campaign which is struggling to take off .

The mayor of Paris is poorly placed in the polls where she vegetates around 5% of voting intentions?

"It's a very good sign," said François Hollande, himself far from being a favorite before finishing at the Elysee Palace in 2017, during a visit to the Tulle market.

Family photo, but not only

Between stalls of cheeses, meats and other sellers of early vegetables, the duo appears in front of the press for a family photo, but also, according to Anne Hidalgo, “to hear and enrich oneself” in contact with the 15,000 inhabitants of the city. of which François Hollande was the mayor between 2001 and 2008. “How are you? ", " How are you ? "," Are the children okay? ": At his home in Tulle, where he owns a house, the former president is very comfortable in the streets he knows by heart.

"These pancakes look good", says Anne Hidalgo in front of a counter, quickly picked up by the manager Françoise, 60, who explains to her "pancakes, that's the name in Paris, here, they're tourtous" .

Asked at the bend of a cheese stall about the stammering campaign of the mayor of the capital, François Hollande insisted: "Where does it skate?"

The campaign has not yet started!

"Before continuing:" Here we set off, that is the object of our visit, the campaign really begins, in my experience, in mid-January.

Anne still has time to convince the French.

"

The candidate, always accompanied by the former president, must work on it this Saturday evening during the Feast of the Rose in Malemort, a village near Brive-la-Gaillarde, after a signing session in the aftermath. -midday at the Brive Book Fair.

" Until the end "

In the meantime, François Hollande is there to give advice. “There are cycles. It is not the same thing to be in the media space several months before the election and to be a candidate ”, he judges, directly targeting the putative far-right candidate Eric Zemmour, very present in the elections. media. For him, "the French are not yet in the choice, but in the gaze" of what is happening, "sufficiently mature and aware of the issues not to put themselves in the perspective" of electing a populist candidate in next april.

But he considers all the same “worrying” the “themes used, the sentences pronounced and the provocations made” in the electoral campaign. To succeed in his campaign, he advises Anne Hidalgo to create "the force which will allow the French to give themselves the prospect of alternation". Alongside François Hollande and Anne Hidalgo on the station market, the current mayor of Tulle Bernard Combes (DVG) also welcomes the candidacy of the socialist, "the most serious on the left" with "a vision of a woman who has experience and skills ”.

"She embodies more than the PS, she embodies the entire left," wants to believe Bernard Combes, who nevertheless slammed the door of the Socialist Party in September.

Anne Hidalgo assures him: "We have had difficult years: the PS collapsed after the presidential election in 2017 but the great idea that we carry in my family of thought, social democracy, is there".

“And I feel that many French people are orphans,” she emphasizes.

Convinced that she can straighten the bar in the polls, the mayor of Paris insists in front of the station, determined: "Yes, I will go to the end!"

".

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  • Campaign

  • Tulle

  • Francois Hollande

  • Anne Hidalgo

  • Presidential election 2022