Russia said Tuesday it would pull out of the Council of Europe after pressure mounted for Moscow to be expelled from the pan-European rights body over its invasion of Ukraine.

Essentially jumping before it was pushed from the Strasbourg-based body, the Russian foreign ministry said it had given notification of its departure to the Secretary General Marija Pejcinovic Buric.

The decision draws the curtain on Russia’s quarter century membership of the Council of Europe (COE) and also opens the way for Moscow to reimpose the death penalty if the authorities decide.

The so-called “Ruxit” from the Council of Europe means that Russia will no longer be a signatory to the European Convention on Human Rights and its citizens will no longer be able to file applications to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR).

It is only the second time in the history of the Council of Europe that a member state has announced it has quit the body after Greece walked out temporarily in the late 1960s.

Russia was suspended from all its rights of representation a day after tens of thousands of troops entered Ukraine on February 24.

The body’s parliamentary assembly was Tuesday also expected to pass a resolution urging the committee of ministers — the COE’s main decision making body — to start a procedure to expel Russia.

Buric “received formal notification from the Russian Federation of its withdrawal from the Council of Europe”, the body’s spokesman Daniel Holtgen confirmed.

Ukraine’s Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal had on Monday demanded that Russia be immediately expelled, saying it had no right to remain a member after sending troops to the pro-Western country.

Eyes on death penalty

The Russian foreign ministry posted a statement on “launching the procedure to exit the Council of Europe” on its Telegram account, adding it had “no regret” about leaving.

Russia joined the Council of Europe in 1996.

The ministry said its exit would “not affect the rights and freedoms of Russian citizens” and that “the implementation of already adopted resolutions of the European Court of Human Rights will continue, if they do not contradict Russia’s Constitution”.

It claimed that EU and NATO member states within the Council of Europe had turned the organisation into an “instrument for anti-Russian policies”.

Russia’s exit will mark a major change for the ECHR which acts as a court of final instance when all domestic avenues are exhausted.

Cases brought by Russian citizens have piled up at the ECHR accounting for 24 percent of the current cases, such as those concerning dissident prisoner Alexei Navalny.

No member state has ever been expelled from the Council of Europe, which was created in 1949 and has 47 member states including Russia.

Moscow’s move has one precedent — when it was under military rule Greece walked out of the body in 1969 to avoid being expelled. Athens then rejoined in 1974 after the fall of the junta.

Not using the death penalty is a precondition of COE membership, and former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev, now deputy national security council chief, had evoked bringing back capital punishment if Russia left the body.

Medvedev had described Russia’s suspension as “a good opportunity to restore a number of important measures to prevent especially serious crimes — such as the death penalty… which is actively used in the US and China”.

Russia has observed a moratorium on the death penalty since 1996 though it has never formally abolished the practice.

Belarus, the only European country to still use the death penalty and Moscow’s ally, is not a member of the organisation.

A Russian exit will also deprive the COE of nearly seven percent of its annual budget, around 500 million euros ($545 million).

But Buric told AFP this month she had received “reassuring” signals from several member states, including France and Germany, ready to guarantee the financial sustainability of the organisation.

Source: AFP

EU leaders gathered at Versailles for a two-day summit starting Thursday on how to address Russia’s invasion of Ukraine amid calls from Kyiv for a fast-tracked path to membership in the European bloc.

EU leaders doused Ukraine’s hopes gaining membership of the European Union quickly on Thursday, as they met to urgently address the fallout of the Russia’s invasion.

The meeting at the palace of Versailles was set to be the high point of France’s six-month EU presidency, but President Emmanuel Macron is instead leading a crisis summit following Russian leader Vladimir Putin’s brutal disruption of decades of stability in Europe.

The Ukraine war and the EU’s energy supply were to dominate the two-day meeting, with leaders sitting down for dinner in the same Hall of Mirrors where Western allies carved out a new map of Europe in 1919 after World War I.

“Europe will change even faster and stronger with the war (in Ukraine)”, Macron said as he greeted his counterparts at the former residence of France’s Sun King, Louis XIV.

The 27 heads of state and government met as fighting raged for a 15th day in Ukraine, with an outcry over the bombing of a maternity hospital in the besieged Ukrainian city of Mariupol.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky described the attack as a Russian “war crime”. Moscow denied carrying it out, calling it a “staged provocation” by Ukraine.

Macron dubbed it a “disgraceful act of war”, with leaders from across the bloc condemning the atrocity and Spain calling it a “war crime” that demanded punishment.

The conflict has seen a swell of support in the EU for Ukrainian President Zelensky, but leaders used the talks to reiterate that a speedy track to membership was impossible.

“There is no such thing as a fast track,” Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte said as he arrived for the talks.

“I want to focus on what can we do for Volodymyr Zelensky tonight, tomorrow, and EU accession of Ukraine is something for the long term, if at all,” he added.

Luxembourg’s Prime Minister Xavier Bettel warned against giving Kyiv the impression that “everything can happen overnight”.

‘Biggest issue’

Even before the war, Macron’s ambition for the summit was to lay down a path to strengthen Europe’s stature on the world stage.

The issue took greater significance with Russia’s war on the bloc’s eastern edge and leaders were to explore ways to shore up Europe’s self-reliance in a starkly more dangerous world, especially on energy.

The conflict has seen energy prices skyrocket, threatened the economy and sparked a pressing discussion on where Europeans can turn for gas and oil.

The EU imports about 40 percent of its natural gas from Russia with Germany, Europe’s biggest economy, especially dependent on the energy flow, along with Italy and several central European countries.

About a quarter of the EU’s oil imports also come from Russia.

Europe’s dependency on Russian energy even caused the first crack in the West’s unified response to Putin’s aggression, with the EU this week shying away from a ban on Russian oil imports implemented by the United States and Britain.

According to a draft of the meeting’s final declaration, the 27 leaders will cautiously agree to “phase out” the bloc’s dependency on Russian gas, oil and coal.

‘Resolutely invest’

The EU leaders will also try to advance on ways Europe can gain independence in highly sensitive sectors, including semiconductors, food production and most notably defence.

Collective security in the European Union is primarily handled by the US-led NATO alliance, but France, the EU’s biggest military power, would like the bloc to play a bigger role.

Since Russia’s belligerence against its pro-EU neighbour, bloc members have approved a total of half a billion euros in defence aid to Ukraine.

Berlin dramatically broke with long-standing doctrine when it announced it will plough 100 billion euros into national defence.

In view of the challenges, “we must resolutely invest more and better in defence capabilities and innovative technologies”, the leaders were expected to say.

Source: AFP

French President Emmanuel Macron on Thursday announced he would run for a second term in the April French presidential election, seeking a mandate to steer the euro zone’s second-largest economy through the fallout from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the Covid-19 pandemic.

Macron announced his bid for the 2022 presidential election with a “letter to the French” which began with the recent challenges the country has faced during his first five-year term.

“Over the past five years, we have faced many trials together. Terrorism, the pandemic, war in Europe: rarely has France been faced with such an accumulation of crises,” the letter, which was published in several newspapers, began.

“We have not succeeded in everything,” Macron continued. “There are choices that, with the experience I have acquired, I would no doubt make differently. But the transformations undertaken during this mandate have enabled many of us to live better, and France to gain in independence. And the crises we have been experiencing for the past two years show that this is the path that must be followed.”

The letter then stated his intent to run for a second term. “I am asking for your confidence for a new mandate as president of the Republic. I am a candidate to…respond to the challenges of the century. I am a candidate to defend our values…I am a candidate to continue to prepare the future of our children and our grandchildren.”

The French  president, who has been at the centre of diplomacy over Ukraine, left his official declaration to the last minute with the deadline set by the authorities at 6 pm (1700 GMT) on Friday.

While there was always little suspense about the 44-year-old’s intentions, his candidacy announcement was repeatedly delayed because of the crisis in eastern Europe that has seen Macron take a prominent role in diplomatic talks.

Nearly a month before the April 10 first round of the presidential election Macron has yet to engage in any official campaigning and scrapped a rally planned in Marseille this weekend due to the Ukraine crisis.

Rivals ‘boxing on their own’

Ahead of Friday’s deadline for candidates to stand, polls widely show him as the front runner, with the war turning the attention to foreign policy rather than the domestic issues favoured by his opponents.

“In a crisis, citizens always get behind the flag and line up behind the head of state,” said Antoine Bristielle, a public opinion expert at the Jean-Jaurès Foundation, a Paris think tank.

“The other candidates are inaudible. In every media, all anyone is talking about is the invasion,” he told AFP.

One ruling party MP told AFP this week the Ukraine crisis meant that Macron’s rivals were “boxing on their own”, while several polls have shown his personal ratings rising.

The former investment banker admitted in a national address on Wednesday night that the crisis had “hit our democratic life and the election campaign” but promised “an important democratic debate for the country” would take place.

The latest IFOP poll for Paris Match, LCI and Sud Radio on Thursday showed Macron and far-right candidate Marine Le Pen leading in the first round and qualifying for the run-off with Macron getting 28 percent and Le Pen securing 17 percent.

The figures for the April 24 runoff showed Macron securing 56.7 percent of the vote against Le Pen.

Source: REUTERS

Russia’s President Vladimir Putin is ready to dispatch a high-level delegation for talks with Ukraine in the Belarusian capital, Minsk, the Kremlin says, as the Russian military campaign in Ukraine enters its second day.

On Friday, Kremlin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Putin was ready to “send a delegation at the level of representatives of Defense Ministry, Foreign Ministry, and Presidential Administration to Minsk for negotiations with the Ukrainian delegation.”

Minsk hosted previous peace negotiations on the Ukrainian crisis.

Peskov’s statement came as Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky called for direct talks with Putin in a video message earlier on Friday.

China’s Foreign Ministry also said that Putin had told his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, during a phone call on Friday that his country was willing to “conduct high-level negotiations” with Ukraine. The ministry also cited the Russian leader as saying that the United States and NATO had long turned a blind eye to Russia’s legitimate security concerns, repeatedly failed to honor their commitments, and continued to expand military deployments in Eastern Europe, near Russian borders, challenging Russia’s key red line.

Xi reiterated his country’s support for a solution to the crisis through dialog, the Chinese Foreign Ministry said in a statement on its website. Xi also urged all parties to respect the legitimate security concerns of all countries and form a balanced, effective, and sustainable European security mechanism through talks.

Source: Presstv

French President Emmanuel Macron will meet Russian leader Vladimir Putin in Moscow on Feb. 7 and the leader of Ukraine on Feb. 8 to discuss the Ukraine situation, as Western world leaders try and avoid a major conflict with Russia over Ukraine.

Macron’s office added he would meet Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky in Kiev a day after his meeting with Putin.

Macron has said that finding a negotiated path towards de-escalating tensions over Ukraine was a priority, even as the United States has said it was sending 3,000 extra troops to Poland and Romania as Russia amassed troops near Ukraine.

Macron held separate phone calls with the Russian and Ukrainian leaders on Thursday to try to make progress on the status of the Donbass region as part of efforts to defuse tensions, said Macron’s office in a statement on Thursday.

That statement had also said Macron had underscored to Russia’s Vladimir Putin and Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky the importance of discussing the conditions to reach strategic balance in Europe which would enable a reduction in tension on the ground and guarantee security on the continent.

The United States had also said on Thursday that Russia has formulated several options as an excuse to invade Ukraine, including the potential use of a propaganda video showing a staged attack, as the Kremlin condemned American troop deployments in the region.

Source: REUTERS

Italian lawmakers failed Wednesday to elect a new president in a third round of voting, as bickering party leaders blamed each other for pushing the country towards a political crisis.

Prime Minister Mario Draghi, who was the frontrunner for the post ahead of the election, pocketed just five votes as parties panicked at the idea of pulling him from his job.

Political analysts have warned that moving the former European Central Bank head to the presidential palace could deal a fatal blow to an already weak ruling coalition, sparking snap elections.

A fourth round of voting will be held Thursday morning and could lead to a breakthrough, as the threshold for victory now falls from a two-thirds majority to an absolute majority.

Italy’s president is a ceremonial figure but wields great power in crises. Doubts over candidates led some 412 of the 1,000 or so voting MPs, senators and regional representatives to cast blank ballots Wednesday.

Outgoing 80-year old president Sergio Mattarella — who has repeatedly ruled out serving a second term — won the most votes, with 125 ballots.

Names ‘shot down’

Draghi, 74, who was brought in to lead a national unity government a year ago, had been hailed by some as the best candidate for the seven-year presidential post because of his perceived skill in ensuring political stability.

Mario Draghi had been hailed by some as the best candidate for the seven-year presidential post because of his perceived skill in ensuring political stability.

Mario Draghi had been hailed by some as the best candidate for the seven-year presidential post because of his perceived skill in ensuring political stability. Alberto PIZZOLI AFP/File

But most insist he stay as premier to oversee reforms demanded in exchange for funds from the EU’s post-pandemic recovery scheme.

Rome is the biggest beneficiary of the programme, to the tune of almost 200 billion euros ($225 billion).

Draghi hinted last month he is interested in becoming head of state but has since remained silent on the issue.

Marco Travaglio, editor of the Fatto Quotidiano daily, compared him Tuesday to Francesco Schettino, the disgraced captain who was convicted of abandoning ship when the Costa Concordia cruise ship sank off Italy in 2012.

“The parties are asking him to stay (as PM), and he wants to escape,” he said.

‘Still in the race’

Draghi “is still in the race and still has a significant chance” of being elected, Giovanni Orsina, head of the Luiss School of Government in Rome, told AFP.

Former Chamber of Deputies speaker Pier Ferdinando Casini, 66, who got 52 votes Wednesday, had better chances, Orsina said, but warned “things change very quickly”.

Matteo Salvini, head of the far-right League party, accused the centre-left of shooting down every single name put forward by the right — which had initially backed billionaire magnate Silvio Berlusconi.

Berlusconi, who formally withdrew from the race on the weekend, won four votes at Wednesday’s ballot.

“I’m trying to negotiate”, but “any name I put forward I get ‘no’ from the opposite side,” Salvini said.

He and others on the right flatly rejected a proposal by the leader of the centre-left Democratic Party (PD), Enrico Letta, for a lock-in similar to a papal conclave to force them to find a common candidate.

Letta’s suggestion we “shut ourselves in a room, (with just) bread and water” prompted Salvini Wednesday to quip: “if I lose three kilos it won’t hurt, but we don’t need” a lock-in.

Source: AFP

Germany’s navy chief stepped down on Saturday after drawing criticism for saying Russian President Vladimir Putin deserved respect and that Kyiv would never win back annexed Crimea from Moscow.

“I have asked Defence Minister Christine Lambrecht to relieve me from my duties with immediate effect,” Vice Admiral Kay-Achim Schoenbach said in a statement. “The minister has accepted my request.”

Schoenbach made the remarks to a think-tank discussion in India on Friday, and video was published on social media. The comments came at a sensitive time as Russia has amassed tens of thousands of troops on Ukraine’s borders.

Diplomatic efforts are focused on preventing an escalation. Russia denies it is planning to invade Ukraine.

Vice Admiral Kay-Achim Schönbach: “We need #Russia to counter #China. #Putin and Russia deserves respect, #Ukraine has nothing to do with #NATO and #Crimea has been permanently lost.”

In New Delhi, Schoenbach, speaking in English, said Putin seeks to be treated as an equal by the West.

“What he (Putin) really wants is respect,” Schoenbach said.

“And my God, giving someone respect is low cost, even no cost… It is easy to give him the respect he really demands – and probably also deserves,” Schoenbach said, calling Russia an old and important country.

Schoenbach conceded Russia’s actions in Ukraine needed to be addressed. But he added that “the Crimea peninsula is gone, it will never come back, this is a fact,” contradicting the joint Western position that Moscow’s annexation of the peninsula from Ukraine in 2014 cannot be accepted and must be reversed.

Apologies

Prior to Schoenbach’s resignation, the defence ministry publicly criticised his remarks, saying they did not reflect Germany’s position in either content or wording.

Schoenbach apologized for his comments.

“My rash remarks in India … are increasingly putting a strain on my office,” he said. “I consider this step (the resignation) necessary to avert further damage to the German navy, the German forces, and, in particular, the Federal Republic of Germany.”

The Ukrainian Foreign Ministry had called on Germany to publicly reject the navy chief’s comments. Schoenbach’s comments could impair Western efforts to de-escalate the situation, Ukraine said in a statement.

“Ukraine is grateful to Germany for the support it has already provided since 2014, as well as for the diplomatic efforts to resolve the Russian-Ukrainian armed conflict. But Germany’s current statements are disappointing and run counter to that support and effort,” Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said separately in tweet.

Source: REUTERS

Billionaire former premier Silvio Berlusconi announced Saturday he will not run for Italy’s presidency, ending his improbable candidacy two days before voting begins in parliament.

The 85-year-old has been campaigning behind the scenes for weeks to replace outgoing President Sergio Mattarella, although few analysts believed he had enough support to win.

In a statement as he held a virtual meeting with fellow right-wing leaders, Berlusconi insisted he had the numbers, but in the spirit of “national responsibility”, said he had asked those who put forward his name to withdraw it.

“Today, Italy needs unity,” he said, noting the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, adding:  “I will continue to serve my country in other ways.”

The leading candidate for the presidency remains Prime Minister Mario Draghi, the former European Central Bank chief who has led Italy’s national unity government for the last year.

However, Berlusconi, whose Forza Italia party is in the government, repeated his desire for Draghi to stay where he is until general elections scheduled for 2023.

“I consider it necessary for the Draghi government to complete its work until the end of the legislature,” he wrote in the statement issued by his spokesman.

That way it could implement reforms to the tax and justice systems and public administration promised in return for billions of euros in European Union post-virus recovery funds, he said.

Looking for a “broad consensus”

Instead, Berlusconi said he would work with Matteo Salvini of the anti-immigration League party and Giorgia Meloni of the far-right Brothers of Italy to agree a name that can find “broad consensus”.

Members of an electoral college comprising more than 1,000 MPs, senators and regional representatives will begin voting Monday for the new president.

In the first three rounds of voting, each of which will take a day, the winning candidate must secure two-thirds of the vote. From the fourth round, they only need an absolute majority.

Italy’s president is a largely ceremonial position but plays a crucial arbitrating role during political crises and wields significant political influence over their seven-year term.

Source: AFP

UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson was fighting for his political future Friday as outrage mounted after his belated apology for attending a party during lockdown and as a fresh report emerged of other raucous gatherings at his office.

Revelations that Johnson and Downing Street staff breached restrictions at the height of Britain’s coronavirus lockdown have enraged the public, who were forced to abide by rules that prevented them from visiting sick and dying loved ones or attending funerals.

The scandal looked set to deepen Friday as the conservative-leaning Daily Telegraph published an exclusive claiming Johnson’s staff held an alcohol-fuelled party just hours before the socially distanced funeral of Prince Philip in April 2021.

The image of Queen Elizabeth sitting alone in church at her late husband’s memorial service was one of the starkest images of Britain under lockdown.

Most cabinet members have rallied around Johnson after his mea culpa, but the backing from potential successors such as powerful finance minister Rishi Sunak has been distinctly lukewarm.

While expressing “heartfelt apologies”, Johnson sparked ridicule this week by saying he had believed a May 2020 gathering in the Downing Street garden—at which more than 100 people gathered—was a work event.

He urged all sides to await the findings of an internal inquiry.

Douglas Ross, the Conservatives leader in Scotland, has joined at least four Tory backbench MPs in calling for Johnson to quit after the prime minister admitted joining the party.

“Regretfully, I have to say his position is no longer tenable,” Ross told STV.

Cabinet member Jacob Rees-Mogg dismissed Ross as a “lightweight” Tory figure, sparking rebukes from other MPs and warnings that the upper-crust Englishman was bolstering the case for Scottish independence.

Northern Ireland Secretary Brandon Lewis has insisted Johnson had been “very, very sincere” in his apology, amid warnings that Conservative MPs could be mobilising for a no-confidence vote.

‘Partygate’

But Lewis was forced to play down reports that Johnson had in the wake of his House of Commons apology told Ross and other Tories that he did not believe he had done anything wrong.

On Wednesday, Labour leader Keir Starmer for the first time joined other opposition chiefs in demanding Johnson’s resignation.

The prime minister’s poll ratings have slumped since “partygate” allegations emerged last month.

One new poll by YouGov in The Times newspaper gave Labour a 10-point lead over the Tories, its biggest margin since 2013, and said six out of 10 voters believe Johnson should resign.

London’s Metropolitan Police have not ruled out a criminal probe into the May 2020 party, which occurred at a time when Britons were banned from outdoor socialising.

But for now, Johnson’s fate appears to lie in the hands of senior civil servant Sue Gray, whom he has commissioned to look into the May 2020 event and other Downing Street gatherings that year.

Chancellor of the Exchequer Sunak, who was noticeably absent from the House of Commons on Wednesday, said Johnson had been right to apologise and urged “patience” pending Gray’s report.

Another potential contender to replace Johnson, Foreign Secretary Liz Truss, also took hours to issue any public backing, but later said she stood “100 percent” behind the prime minister.

Johnson’s official spokesman insisted the cabinet was united in delivering the government’s post-Brexit and post-pandemic priorities.

“The prime minister abides by the principles of public office,” he told reporters, stressing that Johnson had promised to publish Gray’s report and then update parliament.

Source: AFP

In a presidential campaign dominated by a revanchist and nativistic far right, Christiane Taubira’s presumptive run for the Elysée Palace has more than a soupçon of poetic license, of quiet rage against the dying of the left. It may also be the last chance for her moribund camp to find a voice in an election it appears doomed to lose.

A former justice minister and icon of the French left, Taubira took another step towards a widely whispered-about presidential run on Sunday, saying she would submit to a citizen’s primary vote later this month, which she is tipped to win. The move all but confirms her second presidential run, 20 years after she became the first Black woman to seek France’s highest office.

News of Taubira’s candidacy has sent ripples of excitement among France’s increasingly despondent left-wing voters, of the kind only Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the leftist firebrand, can rival. However, it also adds one more name to an already cluttered field of candidates fighting over a diminishing pool of votes, prompting many analysts to question the pertinence of her belated Elysée run.

“If she somehow manages to unite the reformist left behind her, then her candidacy could be a game-changer,” said political analyst Thomas Guénolé, though quickly cautioning: “Without unity, however, she will become just one more element in a ‘Balkanised’ (and hopeless) left.”

Talk of the left’s chronic divisions is a sensitive issue for Taubira, a maverick who has long shouldered the blame for the far right’s shocking breakthrough in the first round of the 2002 presidential election. Running as a left-wing radical at the time, Taubira picked up just 2.3% of the vote – a relatively small tally but enough to keep the Socialist favorite, Lionel Jospin, out of the run-off.

“She was made a scapegoat for Jospin’s defeat, unfairly so,” said Guénolé, noting that others on the left had siphoned away more votes from the Socialist candidate.

Twenty years on, the once mighty Socialist Party has shrunk to a minor player in France’s political landscape, leaving the left as a whole rudderless and divided. Between them, the seven left-wing candidates currently in the race for the Elysée Palace account for just over a quarter of the electorate, according to polls. Only one – the far left’s Mélenchon – has touched double digits so far, but even he remains far off the 17% to 20% threshold deemed necessary to reach the crucial second round of voting.

Both Mélenchon and Yannick Jadot, the Green candidate, have repeatedly rejected the idea of a citizen’s primary, leaving only a motley group of struggling candidates – including the Socialist Party’s mayor of Paris Anne Hidalgo – among Taubira’s potential challengers. According to her supporters, Taubira, a prolific writer and passionate orator whose words have even been put into song, is the only one with the potential to energise voters.

Rebel at heart

A staunch feminist and a champion of minorities, Taubira, 69, is best known for shepherding a same-sex marriage bill into French law in 2013 when she served as justice minister in François Hollande’s Socialist government. She did so while facing an angry backlash from the conservative and far-right opposition, and with only lukewarm support from her cabinet colleagues.

“Opening marriage and adoption to same-sex couples is an act of liberty, of equality and of fraternity,” she told lawmakers in one of several fiery debates in parliament, echoing France’s Republican motto. She met the opposition’s insults with lyrical flourishes and witty put-downs, remaining calm and composed even when anti-gay-marriage protesters levelled racised slurs at her.

“Taubira is a symbol of anti-racism by virtue of who she is, what she achieved, and the vile, racist abuse she endured,” said Guénolé. “The battle over same-sex marriage also made her an icon of equality.”

Taubira had already made her mark as a champion of progressives more than a decade earlier, authoring landmark legislation in 2001 that recognised slavery as a crime against humanity. It was a personal triumph for the then little-known MP from faraway Guiana, a former French colony in South America, where convicts from metropolitan France were banished up until 1953, a year after her birth.

One of 11 siblings, Taubira was raised in Guiana’s capital Cayenne by her single mother, a nursing assistant who died at age 49. As she quipped in a 2012 memoir, she was born a “[w]oman, Black, poor, what fabulous capital! Every challenge to take up, the promise of a life of exhaustion. But life is more seditious than one thinks.”

A seditious, rebellious streak would run throughout her political career, which began in the ranks of a Guianese pro-independence faction alongside her second husband Robert Delannon, who was jailed in the late 1970s for planning to blow up an oil and gas facility. Taubira soon abandoned the separatist cause and shifted towards more moderate politics, though she never lost her independent spirit.

“Sometimes to resist is to stay, sometimes to resist is to leave,” she tweeted decades later, in January 2016, as she quit the justice ministry in protest at controversial plans to strip French-born dual nationals of their citizenship when convicted of terrorism.

Prior to her departure, Taubira had championed a divisive overhaul of prison sentencing, seeking to institute probation in place of jail terms for petty crimes in an effort to reduce overcrowding in France’s penitentiaries. But her efforts met with resistance from cabinet colleagues and eventually jarred with the mood of a nation deeply shaken by a string of jihadist terrorist attacks.

Battle of ideas

Taubira’s perceived softness as justice minister gave France’s right wing a key line of attack. So did her stances on racism and the legacy of slavery, issues some candidates in the upcoming presidential elections are keen to brush under the rug. While France’s reckoning with its colonial past is still in its infancy, for the likes of far-right pundit and presidential candidate Eric Zemmour, “repentance” has already gone too far.

An advocate of the “Great Replacement” theory, according to which elites are plotting to replace French nationals of white stock with immigrants, Zemmour has dominated the early stages of the campaign in the raucous, aggressive and iconoclastic manner of a Donald Trump – albeit with the veneer of cultured sophistication generally expected of a French presidential candidate.

Some have suggested Taubira’s main aim is to lock horns with Zemmour in a battle of ideas, knowing full well that the Elysée Palace is already out of sight. In the words of Thomas Legrand, France Inter radio’s political editorialist, Taubira’s bid “would offer an alternative narrative, one that is republican, fraternal, racially diverse and universal, as opposed to Eric Zemmour’s bleak and depressing identity politics”.

A diminutive figure, like Zemmour, Taubira is known for her lofty rhetoric and frequent literary citations – particularly from the anticolonial poets of the Négritude movement, such as Aimé Césaire and her fellow Guianan Léon-Gontran Damas. She is equally at ease with talk of Black identity as she is with the French Republic’s core, universal values – a versatility that is anathema to the far right and to others from across the political spectrum.

Having surveyed voters from the immigrant-rich Seine-Saint-Denis area northeast of Paris, mainland France’s poorest department, sociologist Marie Peretti-Ndiaye said Taubira’s candidacy has raised hopes of a less toxic divide on certain issues, such as the place of Islam in France. Among those surveyed, the former justice minister “came across as intelligent, cultured and knowledgeable, far from the cheap shots and petty controversies of the presidential campaign”, she said. “At the same time, the respect and admiration for her combativity was tempered by scepticism about the chances of a woman winning the presidency.”

In recent months, Taubira has consistently topped surveys of left-wing voters’ preferred political leaders. However, she also scores highly in surveys of politicians who are most rejected by the broader electorate.

Should it garner momentum, Taubira’s candidacy “would instantly become a hateful obsession of the far right, whose worst nightmare she embodies”, Guénolé noted. Whether she can alter the narrative of the campaign will depend on her ability to rally the reformist left behind her, he cautioned, stressing the need to flesh out a political and economic platform of which little or nothing is known – and to fulfill at least two conditions.

“The first is to embody something powerful against the far right – and Taubira certainly does. The other is to be a contender for the all-important presidential run-off,” he said. “If she fails to meet the second criteria, all the media will talk about is Taubira’s miserable polling figures. And her candidacy will go the way of others on the left.”

Source: France 24