L’Express: With Nicolas Mayer-Rossignol, the mayor of Rouen, you are taking the iron against Olivier Faure to replace him as First Secretary of the PS and take over the leadership of the party. What do you blame him for?
Lamia El Aaraje: We are not waging iron against Olivier Faure, but for the Socialist Party. It’s not exactly the same thing…
It’s jargon.
No. We are coming out of a five-year electoral cycle in which Olivier Faure was in charge of the PS. I do not forget that he presented himself as First Secretary in 2018 in a difficult context, the day after the election of Emmanuel Macron and a heavy defeat of Benoît Hamon. Nothing was easy, nobody wanted to be a candidate and he took the job. I voted for him at that time and I voted for him again at the 2021 convention because the time had not come to enter into a party battle in the middle of a presidential election. This political cycle is now over, and we must take stock of it. Has the PS gained strength in the local elections? No. It retained communities but it was not a positive dynamic. Did he win the presidential election? No, obviously. Legislative? No more. The presidential score cannot be the sole responsibility of the candidate. The PS, with the strength of these five years under the leadership of Olivier Faure, is 1.74%. It’s a fail.
You clear Anne Hidalgo…
I do not clear it, I say that the balance sheet is global and shared. Olivier Faure seems to consider that everything is the responsibility of Anne Hidalgo and the way the campaign has gone. I did not feel intense and determined support from our First Secretary. Anne Hidalgo has the stature, the experience and the determination to be a candidate. If she made this score, it’s because a lot of things were wrong with the PS.
“The leadership of the PS has forgotten the need for democratic debate”
Wasn’t the Nupes agreement, signed with Mélenchon, the only thing to do to “save the furniture” of the PS after such a failure in the presidential election?
I don’t blame him for the Nupes agreement. We had no alternative to offer, nor any other immediate construction possibilities. What I denounce is the treatment given to certain socialists. In Paris, out of 9 constituencies estimated to be winnable, the PS had none, not even the constituency in which the only outgoing Socialist deputy appeared: me. Out of 577 constituencies, there were 507 where the PS asked its candidates to withdraw without ever taking into account territorial issues. In Occitania, in the East of France and in Brittany, we had candidates much more likely to win than a rebellious.
But what bargaining power do you have when you only get 1.7% of the vote?
When we consider that the agreement must absolutely take place and that there is a need to unite, we respect our partners and we do not humiliate them. The PS came to lend credibility to LFI’s approach. It is only because the PS, however weak, has joined the agreement that the Nupes brand prints. Therein lies the bargaining power. Finally, we were treated to rebels who wanted to crush us and a PS that did not fight for what it embodies historically, territorially. Nothing good can come of this.
There is still a common point in your motion against Olivier Faure. Nicolas Mayer-Rossignol, the mayor of Montpellier Michaël Delafosse and yourself were not “treated” in this agreement. Aren’t you acting out of revenge?
I was angry, yes. I I felt betrayed. It was this feeling of betrayal, of having been let loose in the open countryside by my own political family, which was the most painful. Luckily the activists voted for me to have the nomination. But the approach of “Refondations” is not motivated by bitterness. It is not because participating in a debate of ideas within the framework of a congress, an eminently structuring moment in a political party, that we are motivated by any desire for revenge. The leadership of the PS has forgotten the need for democratic debate and seems to consider that it is necessary to be either with Olivier Faure or against him.
Would the PS do better without the Nupes?
That’s not what I’m saying and I don’t want the debate at this congress to be: “for or against Nupes”. There is a vital need to debate substance, subjects that we have avoided for too long. What is the PS’s position on nuclear power? What do we think of the pension reform if not to say that we are against leaving at 65? Nobody can answer it. On pensions, I am not in favor of maintaining the retirement age at 62, but rather in favor of a gradual retirement with a reduction in working hours for certain trades with a lot of hardship. Refinery workers who breathe oil all day long should be given the opportunity to leave at 55, and others, executives like me, to leave later, at 65. The subject is above all that of social justice.
“The subject of the congress is not Nupes”
But what did the PS do for five years?
Boris Vallaud and the parliamentarians have worked a lot on the substance, and I do not question their work but rather the method of Olivier Faure and the national leadership. The party is supposed to draw inspiration from what is being done at the territorial level (free public transport, social pricing, etc.) to distill a global program and a vision of society to be defended. He doesn’t. Today, I am unable to say what is the project of the PS or its vision of society. We must stop having the shameful left, to spend our time apologizing for being responsible. It must be said that we are the left with the ability to govern, to change people’s lives, to transform society. Olivier Faure cannot explain to us that we must take stock of the five-year term of François Hollande and of Anne Hidalgo’s campaign by flagellating himself, forgetting that between the two, it was he who was responsible for the PS.
Facing Faure, there is also Hélène Geoffroy who, he said, will leave Nupes if she is elected to head the PS…
(She cuts). I completely disagree with this idea. It is not at the level of the debate that we must have in the congress. The subject is not the Nupes but our ability to build a union that will be victorious tomorrow. La Nupes scored 30%, this is the lowest score of the three blocks that clashed. No one on the left has won, and Mélenchon is not prime minister. We must not make the stunted and insult those who do not think like us. It brings together the entire left during the Estates General to establish a common program and leadership.
Since her fall in the presidential election, Anne Hidalgo’s return to Paris has been more than difficult. Everything is electric and controversial. Does she still have a political future?
It’s not for me to answer that. I am appalled at the level of political debate in Paris. How, when you are a Republican and a Democrat, can you condone such actions? The mayor didn’t steal anything, she wasn’t elected by 10 votes… No, she won absolutely and she has four years left in her mandate. I see a Rachida Dati who still hasn’t digested her 2020 defeat and constantly wants to replay the match, I see people who are only moved by the desire to kill her because that’s what their dictates the microcosm of Twitter, and I see ministers, like Gabriel Attal, who consider themselves a legitimate candidate before their time. It is their right, but we are not in 2026. He should deal less with petty Parisian politics, and more with the energy, social and climate crisis that the French face. They are playing politics at a most disgusting level.
You were recently accused of moral harassment by an ex-collaborator. We thought this kind of fact from another time, that of an old generation of politicians and not the new one of which you are a part.
I was surprised by these accusations, also surprised by their context: the day before my entry into the Paris executive and when we announced our candidacies for the PS congress next January. Someone is accusing me, it seems, of this. She worked with me for three months, including a summer month. Neither the Paris Council’s Ethics Commission nor the National Assembly responded to the report. And at the PS, the commission did not make a referral and only received an anonymous email. To date, my team has counted no less than eight newsrooms who have received this kind of anonymous email. It’s a desire to harm me, to dirty me.
But what are you really denouncing? A political cabal?
I don’t know if it’s a set-up but it’s done without my being able to defend myself, since the case hasn’t been brought to court. You know the adage: slander, slander, there will always be something left…