Figure of the far left, leader for three decades of the Revolutionary Communist League (LCR) which he co-founded in 1974, the one whom his friends nicknamed "President" died Saturday at the age of 80, announced his wife at AFP.

Immediately, the tributes followed one another.

"I still hear you say that the best way to celebrate the memory of the deceased is to perpetuate their fight. (...) Doing it without you will never have the same flavor again", reacted Olivier Besancenot who campaigned for the LCR then to the New Anti-Capitalist Party (NPA) alongside Mr. Krivine.

"Emotion and grief. A sad thought to his family and fraternal greetings to the entire Trotskyist movement", commented the Insoumis presidential candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon.

Another candidate for the Elysée, also for the third time, Nathalie Arthaud hailed the memory of a "68ard who never denied his anti-capitalist and revolutionary convictions and remained militant until the end"

Born on July 10, 1941 in Paris, Alain Krivine came from a family of the Jewish petty bourgeoisie, immigrants from Central Europe.

Fed like his brothers to the communist student movements, he was one of the founders, in 1966, of the Revolutionary Communist Youth (JCR), and became one of the figures of May-68, alongside Daniel Cohn-Bendit, Jacques Sauvageot and Alain Geismar.

"Thank you for everything"

His activism earned him a month's imprisonment at the Health Department and led to the dissolution of the JCR.

He was then nominated by the newly created Communist League as a candidate for the 1969 presidential election. One year after May 68, the whole of France discovered Krivine, curly hair, glasses on his nose, and his program: to destroy the capitalist order and redistribute wealth.

He won only 1.06% of the vote.

He also ran in 1974, at the head of the LCR, but failed with 0.37% of the vote.

Journalist for the weekly "Rouge", the organ of the party, and MEP between 1999 and 2004, he resigned from the political bureau of the LCR in 2006, while remaining spokesperson for the movement until its dissolution in 2009.

LFI deputy Eric Coquerel, former member of the LCR, paid tribute to "my comrade Alain Krivine" who "will have been for decades one of the great figures of the revolutionary movement, the human and talented spokesperson of the party who was the mine".

"With Jack Ralite, Alain Krivine was one of the figures who made me want to do politics to change the world," tweeted another rebellious MP, Clémentine Autain.

In a press release, the NPA party insisted that "until the end of his life, Alain will not have let go of anything and will not have yielded to the pressure of + It will pass you with age +", announcing tributes to come in the coming days.

"Hello, old man, and thank you for everything. We continue the fight!", Promised the party.

© 2022 AFP