“I am happy to see you, people of the left from the Alpes Maritimes who have been suffering for so many years from what it means to have a right wing contaminated by the far right,” began Marie George Buffet, congratulating the 1500 to 2000 attendees in her 45-minute speech at the Nikaïa hall in Nice. In her penultimate rally of her presidential campaign, the Communist Party candidate lamented the lack of debate: “They are scared to match their programs against your demands and aspirations. We talked about everything except the essential things. They imagined all possible scenarios so that in the end, we’d have no choice but with Nicolas Sarkozy and Ségolène Royal, then to spice up the debate they dressed up François Bayrou as a man of the left, him the twin brother of Nicolas Sarkozy. They are now trying to scare us with the sinister Le Pen. They have succeeded in diverting the campaign away from essential questions: what can really change for you?” Who she refers to as “they” is up for interpretation—candidates, the media, employers, and Medef.
A recurring target: the right. She classifies François Bayrou and Nicolas Sarkozy together as “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” and notes: “look at their records: five years serving the powerful, five years of repression, five years of blind trust in market forces. For the next five years, behind their forced smiles and fine words, they are trying to put us to sleep. There’s the entire Raffarin and Villepin era agenda, but ten times worse… They consider us usable and disposable at will.” She groups all right-wing candidates (Bayrou, De Villiers, Le Pen, Sarkozy) together and compares them to the Dalton brothers with Laurence Parisot, head of Medef, as Ma Dalton. “I am appalled by Nicolas Sarkozy’s growing temptation not only to solicit the voters of Le Pen but the support of the National Front. I am concerned to read in the words of a favorite of a right wing that I still want to believe is republican, a growing number of extreme right-wing theories. That is why the left cannot afford any leniency towards the right even if it claims to be central.”
Marie George Buffet has a simple strategy. Stagnating in the polls between 2 to 3%, she hopes to capture as many votes as possible so that the Socialist Party candidate Ségolène Royal would look more to her left rather than to her right. Her commitment is to share wealth to enable a significant social program. “Don’t tell me there aren’t financial means! It’s enough to modify the basis of social contributions, to ensure that financial income contributes at the same level as you employees. It’s 4 billion that will come in if we increase the payroll by 1%; it’s 2.5 billion that will enter the coffers, if we reduce unemployment by 100,000, it’s 1.5 billion. Thanks to your work, you have unlocked 564 billion euros of new resources in a year. 70% of this sum that has gone to companies has been spent on takeovers, shareholder dividends, bank repayments, etc.” She desires a tax reform by increasing the tax on large fortunes by 30%. She points out the fact that 57% of the state’s revenues come from VAT and TIPP and only 17% from income tax.
In her speech, she treated Ségolène Royal with consideration. She called on the left-wing government to take responsibility as early as July to “drive a salary increase” and specifically for “public servants” with the creation of a major public service. Regarding institutions, Marie George is in favor of a VI Republic with the establishment of a National Assembly elected by proportional representation, voting rights for foreigners. She wants the left-wing government to retract France’s signature from the liberal treaty of the European Union.
Marie George Buffet in Nice emphasized the need for a new left to block the right wing that she finds unbearable. Three days before the election, she called for the last but one time for anti-liberal voters to unite behind her candidacy. A last call in vain? Results Sunday around 8 pm.
