At the PS, eternal enmities will never hinder the pleasure of a good meal. The proof last Monday in Strasbourg, during this plenary week. MEP Pierre Jouvet, executive of the rose party, breaks bread with the former head of the PS-Place publique list, Raphaël Glucksmann. The third man in the Europeans has never forgiven the apparatus that invested him for writing off his score on the evening of the dissolution. He and Olivier Faure, whom he criticizes for his “submission” to Jean-Luc Mélenchon, have not spoken to each other since the PS summer school in Blois.
But this evening, between two strokes of the fork, the two members of the same parliamentary group chat about politics and strategy. Glucksmann hides his overflowing ambitions less and less, and for several weeks has appeared alongside the internal opponents of the socialist leadership. Jouvet, for his part, serves the aspirations of his boss. The first returned to La Réole. He wants to strengthen his version and affirms that the social democratic left must “work”. Bernard Cazeneuve, who is no longer at the PS, never stops repeating it. L’Occitane Carole Delga too. And Karim Bouamrane, a newcomer to the galaxy of daffodils at the PS, who added more during an event in Saint-Ouen. They all say the same thing: the line, the line, the line! Sweet words that disguise their desire to take on Olivier Faure at the next congress. Facing Glucksmann, Jouvet smiles: “We are going to win the congress, you know that very well. Olivier is still far from the cemetery.”
Since his arrival at the head of the PS in 2018, Olivier Faure has had his ears ringing. Bullets are whistling in his ears, loudly at the time of the Nupes agreement with LFI in 2022 and so loudly since the birth of the New Popular Front two years later. Even more so since this summer: his detractors accuse him of having given Bernard Cazeneuve, a candidate for Matignon, a hard time. They are convinced that the first secretary would organize the erasure of his own political family, for the benefit of Jean-Luc Mélenchon. In Bram (Aude) at the end of September, the same people met around a cassoulet at the big rally of the “government” left organized by Carole Delga. The first of the socialists, half vexed and half satisfied at not being entitled to a conclusive speech, declined the invitation of his best enemy. In Saint-Ouen, a few days later, for the meeting of the ambitious mayor Karim Bouamrane, Faure passed a short head into hostile territory, a few seats from all of his detractors. But he has already left the Bauer stadium when the host of the day addresses him a few kindnesses from the stand. The following weekend, at La Réole, he was not invited by Glucksmann – a point in common with Bernard Cazeneuve – “not sure that he would have been comfortable”, whispers a friend of the MEP. Finally, on the evening of October 7, on the eve of a motion of censure defended by the first secretary, it was François Hollande who called for the inventory of the Faure years to be settled at the congress, he without convolution: “We need a new figure to lead the Socialist Party.” The parliamentary group remained silent. “It was still violent…” confides a deputy, although anti-faurist.
“I always try to be one step ahead”
Olivier Faure observes, impassively. In mid-July, when these major maneuvers were being prepared and he had heard of them, he confided to L’Express: “The closer they are, the more I see them. I have no illusions. I always try to be one step ahead but perhaps I will be one step behind one day and the time will come when I will be replaced.” He is not the type to return blows, rather to accept them. His friends say of him that “everything slides on him”. He wants to be more philosophical, or perhaps boastful. “Either people are better and we deserve to lose, or it raises the level of play,” he said. “It takes more effort than purging.”
Those around him, who had many doubts and criticisms about him before the dissolution, are fighting back today. There is this very recent survey that they do not fail to share on social networks, or in internal loops. The Socialist Party, according to an Ifop study, is, with the exception of the RN, the party receiving the best rate of good opinions, with a remarkable progression since 2017. “The survey says it all, we can be surprised that elephants have no memory,” writes a close friend of the first secretary. Who continues the trial in ingratitude: “When in 2018 our sections were emptying, there was one who took his pilgrim’s staff to raise responsibility for a new generation of socialists.” Olivier Faure, the unloved. In private, he often deplores this lack of recognition and even gets angry and raises his voice. Once is not usual. “I have never let my guard down against the Rebels! Never! I don’t want to be made to be what I am not. I have not abandoned anyone. Whether these people need to value themselves, either . But people are tired of our internal wars and I am fed up too,” he shouted a few weeks ago. In public, marmoreal, he began to recite from Cyrano de Bergerac: “We do not abdicate the honor of being a target.”
Those close to him praise his “resilience”, his rivals call it “procrastination”, this way of “discouraging his internal opponents” since nothing seems to affect him. An art of wear and tear which ends up making even an absurd socialist synthesis possible. Long despised, who still underestimates Olivier Faure? “It’s a crocodile. It can stay for weeks without moving at the bottom of the backwater, waiting while puffing on its electronic cigarette. And when the prey is within its reach… It waits, without giving up its ambition”, imaged ago two years with the World Jean-Christophe Cambadélis. Some of those close to him have remembered the quote: they would not say it better today. Moreover, Faure recently won a cultural battle, and not the least important one. While Raphaël Glucksmann repeated that he did not want to see the left united again with La France insoumise in the event of a new dissolution and early legislative elections, a large majority of PS deputies indicated that this would not necessarily be their choice . “Leaving without LFI means leaving without the ecologists and probably without the communists and therefore we risk having a left-wing union candidate facing a socialist candidate. No thank you,” assures a deputy who is nevertheless critical of ‘Olivier Faure. Electoral realities sometimes die hard.
Faure, Delga, Bouamrane, Hollande, Glucksmann… And who tomorrow? Initiatives are overflowing in the PS, a sign, some believe, of democratic vitality in a party said to be in decline. Healthy competition? The impression is given that personal enmities take precedence over substance. In the PS, everyone defines themselves as the opposite of the other, each convinced of having a destiny that the other does not have. “The problem at the PS is 20 people… 20 people who plot day and night against everyone,” laments a senior executive. “Hating each other does not make a political project and even less a leader. “
The future socialist congress, which must be held at the beginning of 2025, when so many opponents of Faure begged him, before the dissolution, to postpone it until after the municipal elections of 2026, promises to be yet another night of the long knives before a great reconciliation; and then the same battles of leaders, without end. The socialist refrain.
.