The New Popular Front has not yet managed to agree on the person to propose for Matignon. According to Olivier Faure, two candidates remain to be decided, notably that of Huguette Bello against whom he had opposed.
Discussions around the nomination of a candidate for the post of Prime Minister on the left are long. The different parties cannot reach an agreement. This Friday, July 19, two people are still mentioned. They are Huguette Bello, president of the regional council of Réunion, and Laurence Tubiana, director of the European Climate Foundation.
Huguette Bello’s name has been on the table since July 12, as revealed Humanity. The Communist Party had proposed her candidacy, arguing that politics “knows Parliament”, that “its authority is respected. And above all, she is the president of a region that is going through major difficulties in terms of public service, housing, job insecurity (…) She would have this capacity to build majorities and speak with the President of the Republic”, according to Fabien Roussel, national secretary of the PCF. Her candidacy had also been approved by LFI and the Ecologists, but not by the Socialist Party, which then preferred a candidacy of Olivier Faure. Faced with this opposition, Huguette Bello withdrew her candidacy on Sunday July 14.
Huguette Belle is still cited among the left-wing candidates for Matignon after her name came back into the mouths of the rebels and some environmentalists. The Reunionese woman therefore finds herself in competition with Laurence Tubiana, whose candidacy is supported by the socialists. But she was immediately put aside by the rebels, who reproach her for having signed a column published in The worldcalling on the NFP to “reach out to other actors on the Republican front to discuss a program”, which earned it the label of “Macron-compatible” by the rebels.
A vote to decide
Despite the opposition and the withdrawal of Huguette Bello’s candidacy, these two personalities remain the most credible. This is in any case what Olivier Faure, first secretary of the PS, affirmed on Thursday July 18, at the microphone of BFMTV-RMC. This calls for a vote to determine who the NFP will present to Emmanuel Macron for Matignon: “When we can’t make progress, there is a fairly simple way in democracy to decide between candidates: it’s voting. And no one should be afraid of democracy,” he explained, before concluding: “We will have the possibility of saying that the parliamentarians of the New Popular Front have made a choice.”
The idea of a vote is supported by other NFP figures, including environmentalist Sandrine Rousseau, who declared on TF1 on 19 July that she continued to believe in a consensus on these two candidates, but advocated a vote between the two names in the absence of an agreement.