The former leader of the French Communist Party (PCF) and candidate in the 1988 presidential election, André Lajoinie, has died, party members announced on Tuesday, November 26. “Immense sadness at the announcement of the death of André Lajoinie”wrote Fabien Roussel, secretary general of the PCF, on the social network “his fights for the working classes, for his territory, for France”. “We are losing a man of great humanity,” he added.
“André Lajoinie has just left us. The son of farmers, he had a love of people deep in his heart. Member of Parliament, leader of the PCF, André was a fierce defender of the working class”also wrote Parisian elected official (PCF) Ian Brossat on the social network X.
Born on December 26, 1929, André Lajoinie, son of Corrèze peasants, embodied for more than half a century the man of the apparatus devoted to his party. Child of a poor farming family, forced to abandon school after his school certificate to help in the fields, André Lajoinie defended “a predominantly family-based agriculture, with structures on a human scale”.
6.76% in the presidential election
André Lajoinie joined the Jeunesses Communistes (JC) the day after the war, in 1946. A pure and hardline activist, seriously injured in 1958 during a demonstration against the Algerian war, he followed a very classic path: school central party (1964), Moscow cadre school (1967), entry into the central committee in 1972 and the political bureau in 1976. consecration arrived in 1982, with his entry into the party secretariat, then headed by Georges Marchais.
In the 1988 presidential election, André Lajoinie led a difficult battle against the president-candidate François Mitterrand and won a small 6.76%, ensuring his party would be reimbursed for campaign expenses. This specialist in agricultural issues was then a deputy for Allier from 1978 to 1993, then re-elected in 1997. He threw in the towel in 2002, at the age of 72, and decided not to run again.
