Paris (AFP)

Former Socialist Minister of Productive Recovery Arnaud Montebourg said Thursday on France Inter wanting to "weigh" on the 2022 presidential election, while confident that he could not, at this stage, announce "to be a candidate".

"I'm not going to tell you today what I'm doing, because I don't know it yet," said the founder of the Engagement movement.

"I have not found the resources that can allow me to do it, so as it stands I am not a candidate," said Arnaud Montebourg.

His entourage, however, told AFP that his media offensive this week did indeed correspond to "progress on the path to a candidacy".

If therefore "he asks nothing" of the parties officially, he affirmed that he "intends to influence the events" of the presidential election, by making a "realistic, reasonable and constructive political proposal".

"I am available for this serious prospect of a single candidacy, which is necessary to influence events, otherwise we will be reduced to candidatures for testimony," said Arnaud Montebourg.

His "modest but real contribution" is to invite "the left to kick itself in its own buttocks, to avoid going through the Trump box" that the election of Marine Le Pen would represent in 2022.

Because according to him, to prevent a "deadly Macron / Le Pen duel", the left must "think of the popular and middle classes who made the presidential election: Chirac with the + social divide +, Sarkozy with the + work more for win more +, Hollande with + my enemy finance +, Macron with his false revolution which turned into restoration ".

To interest the working classes, the left must, according to him, talk about wages, proposing for example that the public loans that companies have benefited from for the Covid crisis be repaid via the massive distribution of dividends from their company to employees.

But in her eyes, she must also talk about security and abandon the "societal subjects" with which she has "marginalized".

For example, we must "take back control of immigration" and give up "the easy slogan of + Let's welcome them all +".

"The country is on the right on the regal, on the left on the social and the economy, it will take a mixed policy", pleaded the former socialist.

Asked about the rebellious Jean-Luc Mélenchon, already declared a candidate, Arnaud Montebourg estimated: "He was the solution in 2017, I voted for him. But today he is the problem of the left, a blocking factor "for unity.

"By dint of digging sectarian trenches around him, he cannot gather (...). Jean-Luc Mélenchon will not be President of the Republic, everyone knows that", he asserted.

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