The least we can say is that Martine Aubry seems rather realistic for this return.
LA ROCHELLE, Charente-Maritime (Reuters) - Martine Aubry came out of her media silence on Thursday to denounce the "summer of shame" inflicted by Nicolas Sarkozy on the French with his security and immigration policy.
"We are here to say that another France is possible," said the first secretary of the Socialist Party on his arrival in La Rochelle, where the PS summer school opens on Friday.
"France has been damaged, dirty, it's unworthy", declared the mayor of Lille to the press and then to the activists of Charente-Maritime. "I felt like a summer of shame."
When Nicolas Sarkozy makes the link between delinquency and immigration or orders the expulsion of Roma, he "flouts the values of our Republic" and "smears our country abroad", she added.
The leader of the PS had hitherto been content with a simple statement in early August to denounce the "anti-republican drift" of the government.
"I didn't want to sign up for that," she explained Thursday night.
The leadership of the PS defended its strategy, believing that it should not participate in the government's security escalation.
"She is the leader of the main opposition party, not the workhorse," said national secretary Guillaume Bachelay. "His agenda is that of the French, not that of Sarkozy".
THE CANDIDATES ? "THE FRENCH DON'T CARE!"
Martine Aubry also welcomed the fact that the French "did not get caught up" in the President of the Republic's "vast manipulation operation".
"When we fail, we change policy, we don't look for scapegoats," she said to Nicolas Sarkozy.
In front of journalists, she tried to evade questions about the presidential competition within the PS, relaunched before La Rochelle by a series of polls favorable to the left and some confidences from tenors.
A few days before the start of the school year, she set the tone for the summer university, warning everyone against the display of personal ambitions.
"France is in bad shape. We have not come out of the crisis (...) this new school year is going to be very difficult (...) security is a disaster (...) and you are asking me to know if Am I going to submit my candidacy in December, January or December? The French don't care," she said.
In the work "Small murders between comrades", published Thursday, the former Minister of Employment declares, among other things, that she will decide if she is a candidate for the presidential primaries of the PS before the end of 2010.
"My only ambition is that one of us can help change France," she explained in La Rochelle, insisting on "2010, time of the socialist project".
"After the time will have come for choice. I will support the best placed, the one who best embodies hope for the French," she added.
Laure Bretton, edited by Gérard Bon
source: Reuters
Further information :
Marianne2.fr: The La Rochelle summer university has already taken place...
La Depeche.fr: Strauss-Kahn and Aubry in pole position
The echoes : PS Summer University: the debate on the primaries revived
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