In the cobbled street that leads up to the education center of the Legion of Honor – where Emmanuel Macron invited party leaders to chat about France – everyone noticed that he was the only one of the three men in Nupes to wear a tie. We come to see the President of the Republic, all the same! And how we laugh when we see him all grumpy, looking away when Manuel Bompard (LFI), Olivier Faure (PS) and Marine Tondelier (EELV) speak in front of the cameras. Fabien Roussel, he presents well, plus he makes you laugh, with these witty words. And that’s why we love him.
Over the course of Nupes’ existence, he has become an object of political marketing whose virtue is not to be Jean-Luc Mélenchon. Those who support him, the anti-Nupes left for the most part, and a good part of the right and the presidential majority who find him most sympathetic, salute his party patriotism, a form of political courage they say. Unlike Olivier Faure, he would be the one who did not submit to Mélenchon. A resistance fighter from the start!
The good meat
“The detestation of Mélenchon creates sympathy for Roussel,” observes, amused, a PS executive. Carole Delga adores him, Bernard Cazeneuve has “esteem” for him and shares “the same analyses”. The essayist Raphaël Enthoven, a scathing critic of LFI who gives him credit for it, has published a warm book of interviews (Who knows Fabien Roussel?, L’Observatoire) with the interested party. Until recently, rumors were swirling about the leader of the PCF with “ministerial potential.” “Roussel reassures the right because he deeply shares a form of common sense, a love of national culture. He loves good meat and understands the importance of nuclear power,” caresses Julien Aubert, vice-president of the Republicans for who “Fabien Roussel, he’s French.” And to add: “He has his ideas, we tell ourselves that he is human.”
Human certainly, but who remembers that Fabien Roussel is also a communist? The PCF of 2023 is very lucky: we no longer demonize it. Between 2012 and 2022, the hammer and sickle party, victim of its alliance with Mélenchon under the banner of the Left Front, had a very moribund media existence. Oblivion has done its work, and the corpses in the communist closets have been buried. By putting the PCF back in the spotlight, Fabien Roussel even believes he has cleared the PCF of all suspicion, and yet the long communist history still encumbers it today.
A Russian (and Chinese) novel
Last March, the National Assembly adopted a resolution describing the extermination of millions of Ukrainians by starvation – the Holodomor – as “genocide”. An operation carried out by Stalin in the 1930s. The communist deputies voted against. A few days later, Fabien Roussel had difficulty justifying himself: “Did Stalin intentionally cause a famine? Which constitutes the basis of a genocide… There is debate among historians on this question.” The rest of the ecological and socialist left chokes in the face of “this stal argument”, they say. And when the Wagner militia shelled Ukrainian cities, Roussel called for “acting for peace as a priority”, and was offended at the idea of France sending tanks to Zelensky. A year after the start of the war, he continues to demand that Ukraine enter neither NATO nor the European Union. “When we read their programs, the speeches of their leaders and their internal literature, PCF and LFI share the same positions on many geopolitical subjects”, summarizes Laurent David Samama, expert associated with the Jean Jaurès Foundation and author of the Little Red Mornings (The Observatory).
In the summer of 2021, the same Fabien Roussel serves the soup to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in an interview with Xinhua, the regime’s most famous official press agency, speaks of Deng Xiaoping as a “great leader” (responsible for the repression on Tian’anmen Square in 1989, Editor’s note); He praises Xi stronger. And when Jean-Luc Mélenchon affirms, in 2022, that Taiwan is “an integral component of China”, Roussel – once is not customary – approves the words of the man he sidesteps the rest of the time.
Behind “anti-Zionism”…
The PCF also regularly flirts with the anti-Semitic ghosts of its past. “Roussel did not clean the stables,” explains journalist Guy Konopnicki, a member of the PCF until the breakup in 1978. “Since the 1960s, there has been anti-Semitism among the communists which disguises itself under the name of anti-Zionism. It still infuses the party today.” At the beginning of May 2023, the resolution condemning “the institutionalization by the State of Israel of an apartheid regime” set Nupes on fire. Many are rushing towards LFI – which supports the approach – but the text is carried by the communists in their parliamentary niche. Roussel is nowhere to be found, and the socialist Jérôme Guedj protests against a text which does not serve peace between the two countries.
The resolution is all the more surprising because it denounces Israel’s policy “since 1948.” “For a long time, the PCF stuck to the theory of two States, on the 1967 border, explains Guy Konopnicki. There, going back to this year 1948, the date of the creation of the Hebrew State, it It was its very existence that they called into question.”
Chastity
To avoid losing face on the subject, Fabien Roussel knows how to put on a good face. In the middle of the presidential campaign, the deputy (and candidate) proposes a resolution to the Assembly to declare ineligible by the judges for five years people convicted of inciting hatred, convicted of anti-Semitism or discrimination based on religion . This summer, at the height of the Medina controversy, his entourage let it be known that the leader gave “a rant” against Humanity which has just offered its front page, with a major interview in its pages, to the rapper accused of anti-Semitism.
Chaste Roussel. But is it through willful blindness or naivety that Fabien Roussel looks away from this latent anti-Semitism within his party, which obsessively demonizes Israel, still considers the Jewish State as the ally of the American “great Satan”, and makes Palestine an emblematic martyr of an anti-imperialist vanguard, of a stubborn anti-Americanism?
This is how we more easily forgive Fabien Roussel for what we criticize Jean-Luc Mélenchon, out of political interest rather than blindness. One weakens the other, leader of today’s left, at least at the polls. Question of style, tone, and method, too. Affable Roussel, angry Mélenchon. “He understood that to last, he could not hysterize the debate as the Insoumis do. He insists on what allows harmony rather than what divides, and draws a path for the future,” analyzes Samama. So smile, Mr. Mélenchon!