France’s Presidential Race:

Jose Bove Complicates The Contest

by Doug Ireland

February 01, 2007

DIRELAND

France’s presidential election, scheduled for April 22, just got a lot more complicated: José Bové — the feisty founder of the militant farmers’ union Confédération Paysanne, an environmental leader who is recognized world-wide as a major figure in the anti-globalization movement, a best-selling author, and a media star popular with a large slice of French public opinion — will announce his candidacy for president of France today. In an interview last night on France 2 public television news, Bové said that the only thing now that could stop him from becoming a candidate would be “falling under a subway train.”  Bové wants to be the candidate of the anti-capitalist “left of the left” — the disparate coalition of small left political parties, Socialist Party dissidents, the anti-globalization movement, environmentalists, students, left-wing intellectuals, and ghetto activists that in 2005 gave the French political establishment a huge slap in the face when it successfully defeated the proposed European Constitution — supported by the major parties of both left and right — in a national referendum, leading the campaign for the “Non” vote. (see my article, “A Political Revolt in France: What Rejection of the European Constitution Means,” May 29, 2005.)

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