Victorious at the end of January of the Popular Primary, a citizen consultation which brought together 392,000 participants, Christiane Taubira has since been trying, in vain for the moment, to build union on the left.

She relaunched her call for a rally on Tuesday, after a meeting between her teams and that of the environmental candidate Yannick Jadot on Sunday, but she did not take off in the voting intentions, stagnating between 3.5 and 5%, while her team hoped for "a moment of truth between February 5 and 10".

"The polls, they go, they come, it's not likely to worry me," assured the candidate during a trip to Montreuil.

"On the ground the rally, I saw it", she swears, supported by the many Committees that bear her name, launched well before her in the battle.

It is also essentially on them that it relies, as well as on the voters of the popular Primary.

"She is not the candidate of a party", insists her troops, convinced that there is "an obvious base of voters for her in recent weeks".

Still, at this stage, "the dynamic is not there", savor its competitors on the left.

"We can see that in public opinion, it doesn't catch on. A personality isn't everything," analyzes a PS executive.

"I don't think she's going to go, she won't have the sponsorship or the funding," said another at LFI.

The Guyanese candidate is indeed seriously behind schedule, with only 47 signatures of elected officials recorded Thursday by the Constitutional Council, far behind her competitors.

“Faced with difficulties, I put myself in a combat position,” she said Thursday evening on RTL.

But she concedes that there is "a real subject".

"My candidacy is carried by 400,000 citizens. When we have such a base, can we be stopped by the fact that there are no such sponsorships?"

She has the support of the Radical Left Party, whose president Guillaume Lacroix has counted "282 possible sponsorships, and at present, an increase of 170 promises".

"The question now, he says, is the Oath of Romainville", named after this collective of elected officials, who on the sidelines of the popular Primary, had chosen to reserve their sponsorships for those who would rally on the left.

The candidate was also criticized for her lack of a program, which she gradually reveals, according to her travels or press conferences.

And if its proposals are very similar to those of its competitors, she pleads, it is because they are partly drawn from the base of the popular Primary, in which all the left-wing parties participated.

"Battle of February"

From now on "we are in the battle of February", explains his entourage, with a door-to-door campaign and a public meeting per week, then two per week in March.

The idea is also to evacuate the bad patch of last week, marked by its poor performance at the Abbé Pierre Foundation on poor housing, which has sown some doubts.

"It's not his best intervention", admits those around him: "We underestimated the fact that each outing is a great oral from the ENA".

A failure which rejoiced his other competitors on the left.

"We have suffered a lot of attacks since the popular Primary, we have become the target," laments those around him.

Left-wing French presidential candidate Christiane Taubira (c) chats with residents of Montreuil, Seine-Saint-Denis, February 9, 2022 THOMAS COEX AFP

Christiane Taubira seemed sensitive to it: "I don't know if you would have resisted the bashing," she told the press.

But she assures that she will go “to the end” and “will not treat with contempt or betrayal the mandate received at the popular Primary”.

To find the necessary funding, his team relies mainly on donations.

"200,000 people put him + very well + at the popular Primary, if half gives 5 or 10 euros ...", explains a relative.

© 2022 AFP