Setting sun in July 2020. The smell of burnt grills invades the terrace of Pierre Jouvet’s house. The councilor of Saint-Vallier (and spokesperson for the Socialist Party) invited his friend Luc Broussy, president of the national council of the PS, to dinner while the latter traveled the holiday highway, heading towards Cannes. Jérôme Guedj is also around. A road trip in a van in the region, with his son. Chance would have it. Obviously, the fine team talks about politics, about this left at the bottom of the bucket, about the scenarios to consider. “Oh, but I’m far from your stories,” grumbles Guedj. The former deputy for Essonne left the shores of politics since the end of Hollande’s five-year term and the heavy presidential defeat of candidate Benoît Hamon, of whom he was the spokesperson. He has his advice box on old age, his favorite thing. “The more the evening went by, the more we emptied my cellar and the more the political virus reactivated in him,” remembers the host, Pierre Jouvet, who convinced him to come to Blois the following month, where the traditional political return to the old pink house. To tell the truth, politics is lacking in Guedj. He is bored in his new life.
When Prime Minister Édouard Philippe offered to help Agnès Buzyn, he did not hesitate for a second. When the Covid pandemic brought France to a standstill, he made a new offer of service to Olivier Véran, who had become Minister of Health. How many times has his name come up to join the government? The tenant of Matignon would like to count on his old friend from Sciences Po with whom he was revising the ENA in the office of a senator named Jean-Luc Mélenchon in 1995. The good old days. “I’m too left-wing for your president,” Guedj will apologize. Back to the PS then. He joins the small circle of those close to Olivier Faure. His mission ? Strengthen the discourse on secularism and re-weave links with the Republican Spring “gang”.
“Tell me what Mélenchon was like before?”
Two years later, in 2022, when the idea of a coalition of the left takes shape with a view to the legislative elections, after the historic collapse of the PS in the presidential election of 2022, Jérôme Guedj is in the front row. If Mélenchon jokes with the ecologists and the communists, he turns a deaf ear to the outstretched hands of the socialists. An idea popped into Faure’s head: what if Jérôme Guedj, the one who was the disciple, created the link? The return of the prodigal son into the arms of the father? “No, I can’t. The breakup was too strong. It would be counterproductive,” says Guedj, almost moved. Fifteen years since they spoke, or very little and always with violence.
Jérôme Guedj often has tears in his eyes. “He’s sentimental, a real one, but that governs his political action a little too often,” whispers one of his old friends. Five years earlier, in 2017, he watched his ex-mentor’s campaign with the same moist eyes. He would have loved to be there. He even tried to convince Benoît Hamon to withdraw from the race, to leave the field open to the old man. When Nupes organizes its first meeting in the spring of 2022, he gets upset when he sees Mélenchon come to greet his son and shake his hand, without a word. Mixture of feelings: the emotion of seeing a father again, anger at the old man, unable to forget the sorrows of the past.
In the National Assembly, we are no more Nupes than Jérôme Guedj among the socialists. “Woe to him who blows up the Nupes,” he sings from interview to interview. He dreams of Nupes primaries to prepare for 2017, and the rebels love him. During the session interruptions in the summer of 2022, the rebellious young guard comes to see him, the Quatennens, Léaument and others. “Tell me what Mélenchon was like before?” Alexis Corbière joins the conversation. The two tell the big and beautiful story to young people.
“I was wrong about Jean-Luc Mélenchon”
Who could imagine that he would push Nupes into a dead end from which it will never escape? On October 8, the day after the Hamas massacres in the Kibbutz of southern Israel, Jérôme Guedj reacted to the press release from the LFI group which refused to condemn the Hamas terrorist assault. Abuses that they describe as “an armed offensive by Palestinian forces”. “It disgusts me to see and note that some were immediately in a form of relativism, of being sent back to back, of absence of this minimum of compassion which makes up our common humanity”, reacts the deputy on radio RCJ (Radio of the Jewish community), then drops the ax: “the question” of remaining in the Nupes “arises”.
Olivier Faure chokes. “You can’t play personal at a moment like this,” criticizes several followers of the Socialist First Secretary who are angry with Guedj for having hammered the last nail into the coffin of Nupes. A “feeling of betrayal”, says someone close to Faure. “Olivier went to get him, put him back in the saddle at the PS and fought for him in the negotiations with LFI, says the same person. In these moments, we play as a team.” Especially since this was not Olivier Faure’s plan. On October 12, while Emmanuel Macron invited the leaders of the parties and the two chambers of Parliament to a lunch, the President of the National Assembly, in an aside with the socialist boss and that of LR, Eric Ciotti, launched first: “What are you waiting for to leave Nupes?” Laconic response from the person concerned: “I’m waiting for Mélenchon to leave.”
“Did I overreact? No. I spoke with my guts”, defends Jérôme Guedj for whom he lacked “not only empathy and humanism, but also tactical intelligence” in Jean- Luc Mélenchon and his lieutenants. He considers himself more of a “whistleblower”: “The question would have been asked in any case by the anti-Nupes, Carole Delga, Anne Hidalgo and other Nicolas Mayer-Rossignol. This would have led us, in a reflex Pavlovian, to be one with the leadership of LFI, to defend the indefensible. It might as well be the most rebellious of socialists who takes the bullets in the middle of the battlefield.” Today, Guedj readily admits “to having been wrong” about Jean-Luc Mélenchon.
“Why do you have to get angry with the whole world?”
He understood it this summer, during a dinner with the rebellious leader. A tête-à-tête, the first in fifteen years, that they had promised each other during the tribute to Bernard Pignerol, a loyal follower of the leader, in front of the Fédérés wall at the Père-Lachaise cemetery. The two men hugged, cried together and posed for the photographer. Faced with death, a son reconnected with his father. But in the meantime, there was the death of Nahel, the categorical refusal of Mélenchon to call for calm. Nupes became even more tense, and we talked again about this pension battle, spoiled by her angry tweets.
Dinner turns into a fiasco. Black looks of the rebellious, between two stabs of the fork. “You could make Nupes desirable but all that is over. You could be Mitterrand,” says Guedj.” “Ah! Don’t bother me with Mitterrand too!”, scolds Mélenchon who talks to him about a “pre-revolutionary” situation. “No, she’s pre-fascist!”, replies the former son who reproaches him for a “word that makes everything else inaudible “. “Why do you have to get angry with the whole world?” Guedj remembers the meal: “I understood that evening that Jean-Luc was not aware of the responsibility that fell to him to bring together the LEFT. He was the Primus inter pares, the little father of the people of the left but all that interests him is him and him alone. He doesn’t want to be Jaurès, he wants to be a Highlander.”
The death sentence
The disappointment of a man, but also the warning shots from those close to him, from secular friends, from elders who encountered Mélenchon during the days of the socialist left and who know the beast, from Jewish friends too, such as Delphine Horvilleur, the philosopher and rabbi. How many times has he tried to convince them of the merits of the strategy of alliance with LFI, that it would be enough to exert influence from within to turn things around, that the socialists would sooner or later end up returning Mélenchon minority. Some trusted him. With others, the tone is raised. Not to mention the pressure from his wife, the writer Émilie Frèche.
A scene in a small bookstore in Essonne, at the very beginning of October. The author came to sign her latest work (“Les Amants du Lutetia”, Albin Michel). Her husband made the journey, it’s in his constituency. We chat about everything and nothing, politics of course, Mélenchon and the rebels especially. Sigh of Émilie Frèche in front of her husband: “Pfff, you really need to stop with him.” She, like others, saw Guedj realize that the irreconcilable lefts were not just a fad, that Jean-Luc Mélenchon never stopped straining relations with the Jewish community of France. “We don’t like the same books and we don’t necessarily have the same political opinions. She saw my growing disappointment, without a doubt,” says Emilie Frèche’s husband.
By signing the Nupes death warrant, Jérôme Guedj above all killed the father. But now, he doesn’t really know which way to dance. He says he regrets nothing, but all his socialist colleagues observe his discomfort, his isolation. A few days after October 8, LFI deputy François Ruffin and his PS colleague Arthur Delaporte cooked up a column labeled Nupes on the international situation. This involves condemning the terrorist acts of Hamas, calling for the release of hostages and a cease-fire as Israel’s military operation in Gaza began. Socialists, ecologists, communists and rebels agree to initial the text, but several Mélenchonists pose a condition: they will not sign if Jérôme Guedj is one.
The MP for Massy fell from his chair, stunned to have become, in the space of a week, the outcast of the coalition. He insists, in vain. His 2022 credo is thrown back in his face – “Woe to him who makes the Nupes explode”. Disappointed pro-Nupes, lost anti-Nupes… Who doesn’t blame Jérôme Guedj? He even angered the rebellious rebels (François Ruffin, Alexis Corbière, Clémentine Autain, Raquel Garrido) with whom he hatched a plan against Mélenchon during a few secret dinners. The happy gang imagined a “coup” after the European elections and the poor score of the most likely on the LFI list. Some even envisaged the creation of a new group bringing together more than one rebel in Mélenchon. Jérôme Guedj will have precipitated everything, the end of Nupes and perhaps his own.
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