Heres How Bernie Sanders Is Playing a Role in France's Election
April 17, 2017, 10:01 PM EDT
Excerpt:
Sophia Chikirou was a secret emissary of France’s Communist-backed presidential candidate Jean-Luc Melenchon to the U.S. last year, embedded in Bernie Sanders’s campaign.
The 37-year-old crisscrossed the country, going to Miami, Brooklyn and Pennsylvania between March and June. She bought a “Join the Political Revolution Today” t-shirt, campaigned door-to door, filmed her experience and wrote a diary on her Tumblr blogging account about her time as a volunteer for the U.S. Democratic Party candidate.
Her mission: learning how to run a campaign on a shoe-string budget with an army of volunteers, using the Internet and other state-of-the-art technologies.
Back in France, Chikirou, the Melenchon campaign’s communications director, is putting it all to work for the candidate, who has seen the biggest surge in the polls in the last month.
“Melenchon shares many points in common with Sanders and also with Podemos,” Chikirou told Europe 1 radio in January, naming Spain’s far-left populist party, which used similar tactics. “Sanders relied on the people to campaign and that meant to mobilize through social media and that’s mainly what we took from him.”
https://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2017-04-18/here-s-how-bernie-sanders-is-playing-a-role-in-france-s-election
