Disappearance
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Representative of rural communism, the former presidential candidate of 1988, where he received less than 10% for the first time in the history of the PCF, died this Tuesday.
Despite his good nature and joviality, he is the one who reluctantly embodied the collapse of the Communist Party. André Lajoinie, PCF deputy for Allier from 1978 to 2002, who gained notoriety by wearing the colors of his party in the 1988 presidential election, died this Tuesday, November 26. He was 94 years old.
Son of a farmer who was also a union activist and public writer in his village, born in Corrèze in December 1929, it was nevertheless in neighboring Allier, where the party parachuted him in 1973, that he made his career. Elected for more than a quarter of a century from the constituency of Saint-Pourçain-sur-Sioule, André Lajoinie was an exemplary representative of this rural communism which died out over the century. Due to lack of means, he had to stop his schooling after the school certificate to work on the family farm. In the wake of his father's left-wing and resistant commitment, he joined the Young Communists in 1946. Ten years later, after having climbed the ranks, he was federal secretary of the PCF in charge of propaganda. In 1958, he was seriously injured during a clash against supporters of French Algeria on the sidelines of a demonstration in Brive-la-Gaillarde and had to be trepanned.
Candidate of a PCF divided and swallowed up by Mitterrand
In the 1960s he became a journalist for the communist magazine the Earth with Waldeck Rochet. After the party executive school in Choisy-le-Roi, destination Moscow in 1967 and 1968, where he continued his militant training
