Presidential election in France: Emmanuel Macron announces his candidacy for a second term
Steph Deschamps / March 4, 2022
I am a candidate: Emmanuel Macron made his candidacy for a second presidential term official on Thursday evening, in a letter to the French published on the websites of several media.
We will have to work more and continue to lower taxes on work and production, adds the president-candidate in a three-page text in which he gives a few hints on the main lines and values of his project. A reference to his contested pension reform, suspended by the pandemic.
He also promises a different approach. We have not succeeded in everything. There are choices that, with the experience I have gained from you, I would probably make differently, he acknowledges, his only allusion to the social crises that marked the beginning of the five-year term before the pandemic.
After defending his record, particularly in the face of the pandemic, he also indicated that he wanted to give priority to schools and to our teachers, who will be freer, more respected and better paid and also to preserve and even improve the French social model.
Another commitment is to continue to invest in our innovation and research in order to place France at the forefront of sectors such as renewable energies, nuclear power, batteries, agriculture, digital technology and space, which will shape the future.
The stated objective is for France to become a great ecological nation, the first to be free of dependence on gas, oil and coal.
As far as values are concerned, he pleads not to choose withdrawal or to cultivate nostalgia in order to build the France of our children, not rehash the France of our childhood.
I am a candidate to invent, with you, a unique French and European response to the challenges of the century, he insists.
Going into the details of some already known reform projects, he mentions his wish to invest in allowing everyone to live out their old age at home, to make retirement homes more humane and to better include people with disabilities and improve health prevention.
Finally, he writes that he wants to promote a certain way of being in the world, an age-old art of living, rooted in each region, each canton, each city and each village, whether in metropolitan France or in our overseas territories.