It was to be a festive weekend “of ideas”, three days of debates bringing together the oils of Nupes, from Manuel Bompard to Olivier Faure and Marine Tondelier, via Boris Vallaud or Cécile Duflot, from the left of yesterday, her. There were the smiles of each other, in shirtsleeves under the crushing sun of La Charité-sur-Loire, the selfies posted ad nauseam on social networks. All is well, in the best of worlds.
Three days of debate and, to conclude, a warning shot from the public. A woman, microphone in hand: “I only see speeches based on fear of the RN. I find that distressing. We have the impression that if there was not this subject, you would not be in questioning you on the left dropped for so long. I’m appalled.” Another left-wing voter: “When I hear you, I feel elected officials very far from the people.” Tondelier will answer them that she regrets that they did not speak “of drought or the death of Nahel”, Bompard that he “understands the remarks”, and Faure to defend himself: “It’s a little too easy to wipe their feet on the parties.”
Critics yes, but not too much is needed. The Nupes, so often announced on the edge of the precipice, hangs on, but for how much longer? “The tide is starting to turn,” concedes an LFI deputy worried “for the coming months”. The lefts have taken up what they knew how to do best before the Nupes existed: to tear themselves apart in the public square and multiply the low blows. The recent riots born of the death of Nahel have relaunched the division machine, and everyone has criticized the “ambiguous” attitude of Jean-Luc Mélenchon and his lieutenants, who have conditioned the call for calm on a need for justice. The boss of the PS Olivier Faure, whose entourage keeps repeating that it is “time to take up the torch on the left”, therefore expressed a “deep disagreement” with his comrade Insoumis, even judging that LFI “is lost “. “We have never called for violence but he voted for his friend Bernard Cazeneuve’s ‘license to kill’ law in 2017. The disagreement is this!”, shouts Mélenchon’s entourage for to defend oneself.
Mélenchon and the presidential objective
Tuesday, July 4, at the National Assembly, the meeting of the Nupes intergroup was “very tense, with meaningful silences”, reports a participant. A “serious” explanation, understates another, where the jokes already torpedoed by the press have flown even more. “Jean-Luc Mélenchon is the disruptive agent of our operation”, launched a socialist, tired of the tweets and interviews of the leader Insoumis which force them to comment or to position themselves every four mornings. Michaël Delafosse, the socialist mayor of Montpellier, anti-Nupes tendency, considers that the question of urban violence is far from being anecdotal for the left: “It is no longer just about Europe but about the relationship to violence. Since the dawn of time, this subject has been at the heart of the creation of the left, between those who refuse it without ambiguity, and those who accept it and embrace it.Socialists were born because they refused and condemned it. bluntly.”
Lately, among ecologists as well as socialists, communists and some rebels, the conviction has arisen that Jean-Luc Mélenchon no longer really wanted the Nupes, as it obliges him, as it opens the door to a departure in retire earlier than he really wants. Because, since the start of the school year, the strong man of LFI has lost his superb politics, including within his own movement. The Quatennens affair and the criticism from his own ranks reminded him that he could not tame a group of 74 deputies, of which he does not know half of the members, as he could do with his 17 parliamentarians under the previous legislature .
On one side there are the soldiers, on the other the slingers and, in the middle, a “soft belly” which sometimes defends him, sometimes criticizes him. Since January, Mélenchon invites them in small groups to lunch, to get to know them better, to master them. They feel flattered, and less tempted by the chef’s criticism. “They say that Jean-Luc is alone, but only his line will survive the Nupes, boasts a faithful. You have so often buried him.” The presidential election of 2027 remains its only objective, who still doubted it?