Popular Support
The PRG remains rather weak on its own electorally, averaging around 2% of the vote (2002 presidential candidate Christiane Taubira won 2.32% of the vote); which explains why the party depends on its stronger ally, the Socialist Party (PS) for support. Almost all of the party's deputies and local officials were elected with no official Socialist opposition.
The major exception is in Corsica, where the party has historically been the largest party on the non-nationalist left and remains so to this day, due to a tradition of political dynasties (such as the Giacobbi family) and the weak infrastructure of the PS on the island. Paul Giacobbi represents Haute-Corse in the National Assembly (Émile Zuccarelli, an internal rival of Giacobbi and current mayor of Bastia also represented the island in Paris until his 2007 defeat), and Senators Nicolas Alfonsi and François Vendasi represent the Corsican PRG in the Senate. Giacobbi is also President of the general council of Haute-Corse.
In metropolitan France, the PRG is able to sustain a long-lasting Radical tradition dating back to the French Third Republic, most notably in the southwest or departments such as the Eure-et-Loir and Eure.
The party is represented overseas in French Guiana by Christiane Taubira's Walwari, one of the major parties of the local left.
Read more about this topic: Radical Party Of The Left
Famous quotes containing the words popular and/or support:
“It is said the city was spared a golden-oak period because its residents, lacking money to buy the popular atrocities of the nineties, necessarily clung to their rosewood and mahogany.”
—Administration in the State of Sout, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
“Any relation to the land, the habit of tilling it, or mining it, or even hunting on it, generates the feeling of patriotism. He who keeps shop on it, or he who merely uses it as a support to his desk and ledger, or to his manufactory, values it less.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)