Former justice minister Christiane Taubira joins French presidential race

Paris, Jan 15 (EFE).- Former justice minister Christiane Taubira launched her bid to join the presidential race in France on Saturday in an attempt to rally the left amid an overcrowded list of candidates scrambling for the April votes.

Taubira, justice minister from 2012 to 2017, is highly respected among many on the left, although some members of the Socialist Party have reproached her for her individualism.

“I’m committing myself here before you because I share your aspiration for another kind of government,” Taubira, 69, told her supporters during a speech in Lyon, southeast.

Taubira will run against six left-leaning and environmentalist candidates, none of whom have a chance of winning the presidential race, according to polls which anticipate a second round of the votes.

Competing candidates include socialists Anne Hidalgo and Arnaud Montebourg, neo-communist Jean-Luc Mélenchon, environmentalist Yannick Jadot and communist Fabien Roussel, none of whom currently exceed 10% in the polls.

Taubira said she would withdraw from the race if she does not win the “primary of the left”, an online vote that will take place from January 27 to 30, and for which 120,000 voters have already registered, although only some candidates have agreed to respect the result.

Polls for the April presidential election place incumbent president, Emmanuel Macron, in the lead in a tight duel that would require a second round with conservative Valerie Pécresse nipping at his heels.

Taubira said she had decided to run amid enduring “inequalities, injustices and discrimination” in the country.

She pledged to fight for better wages and greater financing of public health and education.

Born and raised in the South American territory of French Guiana, in 2002 Taubira was a candidate for the Radical Left Party (PRG), a small center-left formation that disappeared in 2019.EFE

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