The time has not (yet) for settling scores at the PS but the congress is fast approaching. After European elections and surprise legislative elections which benefited the pink house, yesterday decimated, many socialists are looking for the recipe to take back the keys to the truck on the left from Jean-Luc Mélenchon and his Insoumis, without however returning to the union of the left in vogue since 2022. For Stéphane Troussel, president of the department of Seine-Saint-Denis, long-time PS executive, a change of era is taking place for the left. The PS can be the driving force before 2027, provided that we put egos aside and work on the program of which it weaves some major axes.
L’Express: François Hollande wants “a new figure for the PS”. Has the socialist congress, which is due to take place in early 2025, actually started?
Stéphane Troussel: François Hollande wants to resume the interrupted course of his five-year term. It’s his right. But that’s not my subject. We are entering a new period, the PS is once again becoming the place for debate on the left. Many, we see, say today that there is an interest in leading the PS when seven years ago, it was in limbo and isolated. It is around the Socialist Party that the future of the left is being played out. A new period is starting but everyone must be responsible in the face of the risk of the left falling apart. Fragmentation and meetings across the four corners of France do not build a project or a leader. We need another response, a united response, a new PS, social and environmental training.
But with whom? Many initiatives are springing up here and there, from Glucksmann to Bouamrane…
With everyone. This rebalancing to the left, with the PS as the driving force, is the culmination of the work started since 2017 which has placed the PS back at the heart of the left, without ambiguity. The challenge now is to make common cause. Everyone who left must come back if they want to help socialism and therefore the left win. This is why I say to Benoît Hamon and Bernard Cazeneuve: come home! The PS congress, when it takes place, must be a congress of refoundation. It will be open to them and to all those who want a common project, to those disappointed with Mélenchonism as well as to those disappointed with Macronism. But it is necessary to put an end to egos so that this great socialist formation becomes desirable again and wins people’s hearts.
With 13.8% in the last European elections for the socialist candidate Raphaël Glucksmann, can we really say that this is a rebirth of the PS?
The European fight that Raphaël led, the causes he fiercely defended are all to his credit… He had a very good campaign. But the score achieved is that of Yannick Jadot in 2019. We stayed at the gates of the towns and towers. There is still a way to go. Unless you want to knowingly fail, it is vital that the different lefts come together around a common platform. The success of the Republican Front in the second round of the legislative elections was only possible because the left was strong and united in the first round, and because it had initiated it against the advice of others.
The fact remains: 11 million voters voted for the RN and its allies in the first round. This isn’t a victory for the left, is it?
This is our biggest challenge: the continuing rising tide of the far right. We are at a crossroads… In 2027, there will be either a headlong rush towards the union of the rights and the extreme right, or a left which will have been able to invent a new model to change people’s lives and control our destiny. The Republican Front is not a political line but a democratic reflex. To think otherwise is a political error. Also thinking that a moderate position is enough to prevail against the far right is another. We need radicalism, but socialist radicalism. The project before the casting. Programmatic work before the race of the little horses. We spend too much time reacting to the comments of comrades just as we spend too much time overbidding the themes imposed in the public debate by CNews and the far right.
Everyone on the left wants union, but everyone has their own sauce. Isn’t this a game of postures?
The best way to create a winning union is around substantive issues. I have no problem discussing with those disappointed with Macronism and Melenchonism about what must or should have been done. But it doesn’t just happen with them, it must happen with mobilized civil society, from unions to NGOs, which we have too much of a tendency, on the left, to leave orphaned from one election to another. They have things to say, to help us find a political outlet, to build a project. We must get to work to build a project which expresses the need to rebuild the productive capacity of France, which fights against this desertification of public power which downgrades our territories, from the France of the towers to that of the towns.
A project for a new energy policy, a project which also involves a major tax and banking reform. A new pact of social justice. We must imagine a new European course, where industrial planning and social convergence policies must be imposed. It is the end of this chimera of a country without factories, where free and undistorted competition would be king. It’s a whole presidential project that we have to build, on the left, from Hamon to Cazeneuve, from the socialists to the rebels, but to succeed we must above all refuse to wallow in postures.
You seem to forget Jean-Luc Mélenchon who, with his eloquence, his program – whatever people say about it – prepared and worked on for several years, with two presidential elections with 7 million votes or more, will have his say. However, he is a repellent for many on the left…
I have other things to do than look at Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s navel and Twitter. He could have been but he is no longer the one who can make the left win and beat the far right. The subject is therefore elsewhere. Of course, we must recognize the rebels for having kept the left afloat in 2017 and 2022, but we can no longer afford to remain on the doorstep of the second round of the presidential election. A new period is beginning, with a PS reasserting itself. There are almost as many socialist deputies as rebellious deputies, this is proof of a rebalancing. I do not say this as a pretext for disunity but because it is the only way to make the left a majority. I know that the people of the left have forgotten nothing of our past errors, but I also know that they want to win and build something else.
But what about the differences in values and principles that have been expressed between the rebels and the socialists over the last two years, from the Quatennens affair to October 7?
François Mitterrand and Lionel Jospin did not hesitate to tell Georges Marchais their four truths. We must refuse the excesses and excesses of Jean-Luc Mélenchon. We have to do without him. We assume confrontation when it needs to take place. But I don’t believe that Mélenchon is the alpha and omega of the rebellious left. There are people who think differently, who share unity and values in common with us. You have to talk and do things with them.
.