What bothers me is the positioning (if not posturing). Yes, we hear some welcome sounds in this debate: but the aim of the debaters is to persuade a leftwing electorate to vote for them in a primary. What policies would either candidate suggest later in the campaign, when addressing the electorate as a whole? How "centrist" would they then try to appear?

Aubry has always come across as more solidly on the left, and less given to compromise, than Hollande. This is not just an image she cultivates. Yet, here again, it's to her advantage in this primary to appear so, feeling as all the candidates have certainly felt, a groundswell from leftwing voters sending a message to the upper echelons of the PS (witness Montebourg's 17%). So it's her game to be "not soft left".

So a debate that positions itself leftwards to speak to a leftwing audience, and two candidates who adopt respective positions within that debate to appeal to a broad grouping within that electorate (harder or softer left). Shadow boxing?

Two more or less minor items have recently worked their way into my impressions on this. Here's one, from Mathieu Sapin, who recently began a sketchpad reporting blog for Libé on the presidential campaign:

Bottom left: "A bloke on Martine Aubry's barge HQ, the night of the PS primary first round"

Speech balloons, clockwise: "Nah, this is working out fine. With a ten-point gap, that means everything. It's a quasi-defeat, if not more..."
"Nah, in a TV debate, she can eat him alive... Yeah..."
"No, but it'll have to be a dirty campaign. Kind of: a woman president and blablabla..."
"... she's unbeatable at getting people to swallow stuff she doesn't believe in, the 35 hours etc..."
"Listen she was almost beautiful this evening..."

(Note to Aubry: if this really is the kind of "communicator" you've got around you, you're twenty years late. Get rid of them pronto.)

The other is an impassioned missive sent to me by a friend, a Frenchwoman in her late 30s, (neither a member of the PS nor involved in Aubry's campaign), in which she pleads Aubry's cause, clearly believing what she writes (among others, the fairly often-stated view that Libération is campaigning for Hollande...).

...je sais que Martine Aubry, si elle était elue présidente,n'aurait pas pour ambition de se cantonner a distribuer des béquilles sociales dans un monde en proie aux tempêtes financières et vautours de toutes espèces qui s'abattent, entre autres , sur les citoyens, classes moyennes et populaires confondues, de l'Europe.
(Elle)... a pour projet de tourner la page de l'ultra libéralisme et de reconstruire l'Europe sur de nouvelles bases. Elle veut réguler la finance,s'attaquer la ou ça fait mal, réindustrialiser la France...

...I know that Martine Aubry's ambition, if elected president, would not be limited to handing out social crutches in a world which is prey to financial storms and vultures of all kinds that batten on, among others, the citizens of Europe, middle and working classes together.
(She)... aims at turning the ultra-liberal page and reconstructing Europe on new foundations. She wants to regulate finance, hit where it hurts, reindustrialise France...

I don't know how she "knows" these things. Projection, some? But her passionate plea moves me until... I remember how Aubry left the Jospin government and never publicly fought (because work-sharing is a greenish DFH notion?) for the 35-hour working week reform she had introduced as Labour Minister, and which has been dragged in the mud and chopped up piecemeal by the right since then...

Conclusion, we need other politicians than these. And we haven't got them. So, if I were voting in the primary (I can't), I'd vote for Aubry. There's at least a chance she may be more than the transparent Hollande.