It seems that to exist, you have to shock. The noise, the fury, would have paid off. Does Manon Aubry only have that left in her hands? Tuesday May 13, on the LCI set, she tried it. “We have to know how to maintain reason. Russia did not march on kyiv,” she defended. The army did not march “on” kyiv, but towards kyiv, and has indeed rained its bombs “on” the Ukrainian capital since the first days of the war. This is called a foul. A week earlier, the one who presented herself as one of the most unionist of the Nupes, speaking of Raphaël Glucksmann as a comrade, wrongly accused the latter of putting his “pockets full” by asserting that he part of these European deputies “paid by lobbies, companies or governments in addition to their elected compensation”. Yesterday’s “friend” even becomes the soldier of a return of Dutchism.
It’s never simple when it’s easy. Take the first left-wing party (its own), La France insoumise: 22% in the presidential election, 75 deputies, a war chest of several million euros for future campaigns, less socialist, environmentalist and communist competitors. in good shape and even three putative candidates for 2027 (François Ruffin, Clémentine Autain and Jean-Luc Mélenchon)… A cozy little nest, apparently. The Europeans are not the presidential election and Manon Aubry is not Jean-Luc Mélenchon, but between 22% and 7% (Ipsos), there is a gulf. The polling institutes’ margin of error only makes the hole a little less gaping. A campaign like a way of the cross for the outgoing rebellious MEP, “cannibalized” by Jean-Luc Mélenchon – the expression is from an LFI deputy –, who presented this election as “the first round of the presidential election” .
Gaza, social or both?
Manon Aubry forgotten, Manon Aubry eclipsed. The founder of LFI, who decided to make the Israeli-Palestinian conflict the alpha and omega of the campaign, only has eyes for Rima Hassan, the Franco-Palestinian jurist, number seven on the list. The meeting organized in Roubaix on April 17 left more than one Insoumis stunned, and Manon Aubry first and foremost. On the poster announcing the rally, we see Jean-Luc Mélenchon, Rima Hassan and David Guiraud, the local MP. The name of the head of the list does not even appear there. Exit also the favorite subjects of the latter, and in particular the cost of living. At the beginning of the year, in front of the Insoumis parliamentarians, Aubry designated “four electoral targets”: the Ultramarines, student youth, working-class neighborhoods, and the social and union left.
“We must campaign on the Nupes program, of which we are the heirs, the only ones to make proposals to perpetuate the hope of union,” confided Manon Aubry, while setting a “campaign objective”: “fight against the great return of austerity.” Tuesday May 13, in Amiens with François Ruffin, she was finally able to make her social speech, talking about relocations, after visiting Metex, a company threatened with liquidation. We saw Anthony Smith, a labor inspector famous for having been sanctioned when he warned about the lack of protective equipment for home help during the first wave of Covid in 2020, fourth on the list but who did not does not have the same favors of rebellious media strategy as Rima Hassan.
Niche strategy
The socio-economic question is hardly on Hassan’s agenda, any more than is the presidential election of 2027. The new rebellious recruit, who intends to get involved with the La Boétie institute, the rebellious training school, to carry its fight for Palestine, looks towards another horizon. If she is elected on June 9, she hopes to join the European Foreign Affairs Committee, and more particularly the Human Rights Subcommittee. The Nupes? The union of the left? Rima Hassan shrugs. Ally with the socialists of Olivier Faure, Carole Delga and Raphaël Glucksmann, whom she easily describes as “colonialist left”? Very little for her. Faced with the omnipresent Rima Hassan and the pre-eminence of the Palestinian question in the campaign, many rebels, close or not to the leadership, are pouting. The most experienced remember the fate reserved for the lost communist strongholds, notably in Saint-Denis, by a PCF which constantly campaigned on this subject. Some, François Ruffin in the lead, would like to campaign on the social question with the same vigor as LFI is committed to Gaza. Because a niche strategy only produces niche scores…
Never mind the risk of a failed campaign. Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s business is not really threatened. The Europeans, these like those of yesterday, have never really interested him. They are at most a “political moment” in the service of the presidential election, that of 2027. The scores of each on the left will only serve to mark the rupture of the Nupes. The rivalry between Rima Hassan and Manon Aubry? The latter’s doubts? Those of certain Rebels? “Nun’s farts”, Jean-Luc Mélenchon wants to believe, as he writes in one of his latest blog posts where he denies hindering the campaign, provoking any “invasion”.
As proof, he only participated in 4 public meetings out of 75 organized and only in one television program. So he’s not that present, of course! If he is not there, it is therefore not him who will make the 7% to 9% in the polls as the polls predict. And if his flock is incapable of doing “better”, as he called for it on the evening of the first round in 2022, it is because he must return to the deep end of the presidential election. Implacable Mélenchon.
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