Two points make a line, so four… The first, the time: 11:30 p.m., Friday June 14. The New Popular Front has just been born and the left-wing parties are concocting the nominations of their future candidates for the legislative elections. La France insoumise waits for the start of the night to draw out its long list of aspiring deputies, constituency by constituency. The “great purge” becomes official. Second point, those concerned: Raquel Garrido, Alexis Corbière, Danielle Simonnet, Frédéric Matthieu, Hendrik Davi, Guillaume Ancelet. Their crime? The one from “lèse-Mélenchon”, swears first. They are outgoing deputies, have criticized the lack of internal democracy, publicly or more discreetly, on excesses or even the press release of October 7. The last two are close respectively to Clémentine Autain and François Ruffin, detractors of the rebellious leader who aspire to be a presidential candidate; in his place, it goes without saying.
Third point: the method. Those affected were not notified. They learn it by reading the official communication of the movement or from journalists who are surprised not to see them defending their seats as deputies. Fourth and final point: the double standard. If they are kicked out for lack of loyalty, Adrien Quatennens, Mélenchon’s eternal protégé son, is invested despite his conviction for domestic violence [NDLR : avant de renoncer dimanche] ; and Elisa Martin, in Grenoble, receives the rebellious alms while she is under investigation by the public prosecutor for “concussion” and “concealment of this crime”. A double standard that angers many rebels, activists and executives alike. François Ruffin did not fail to shoot his arrow at the management: “I have not come under the caudine forks of your stupidity, your sectarianism, he continues. You prefer a man who hits his wife, author of domestic violence, to comrades who have the impudence to have a disagreement with the great leader. Our democracy deserves better than you.”
“There is an obligation of loyalty”
At Jean-Luc Mélenchon, loyalty is an intangible rule. She surpasses the others. In recent days, as the agreement took shape on the left, rumors of purges became more insistent within LFI. Yet another episode, if not the final one, of the internal war launched by the leader in 2022. The Adrien Quatennens affair weakened him and the founder understood at the time that he no longer had control over his flock. He accepts being “in withdrawal but not in retirement”, he said. So he closes ranks. The crisis affecting LFI has accelerated the expulsion of those called “the rebels”. All that remained was to find the niche for the sanction. “There are never good times for this,” Mélenchon’s entourage simply responds, brushing aside any desire to weaken the New Popular Front agreement.
A clean sweep assumed, even claimed. In front of rebellious activists in Marseille this weekend, the coordinator of LFI, Manuel Bompard, assumes the political purge, preferring the expression “painful choice […] which are debated”. For him, “rebellious investiture does not go without saying”, one is not “deputy for life”. But it is another parameter, listening to him speak, which comes into play counts: dedication to the party “In a possible context of the far right coming to power, there is an obligation of consistency and loyalty,” he tells his people, arguing for the importance of to have a future group in the Assembly “more loyal, more united”. The press that the feathered leaders of LFI, Mélenchon first, have so much criticized has paradoxically become a tool justifying the decision. The same Bompard relies on the. The L’Express investigation recounting the birth of the New Popular Front and swears – wrongly – to have read that the LFI rebels were preparing to join a new group in the National Assembly. The leadership, for its part, is behind a decision. of the electoral committee, an internal body of the movement made up of relatives of several loyal soldiers such as Adrien Quatennens, Clémence Guetté, Thomas Portes, Louis Boyard. We also find Manuel Menal, secretary general of the Institut La Boétie, the rebellious training school.
Retaliation
In the loops of rebellious conversations, anger is nourished. In one, composed mainly of LFI elected officials, retaliatory measures are exposed when some are surprised by dissident candidacies against the Communist Party in the 4th constituency of Seine-Saint-Denis: “This candidate will withdraw when the PCF will have given up supporting dissident candidates against LFI”, replies Bompard. A barely hidden reference to the PCF’s support for those purged the day before. Many denounce these expulsions, and again and again recall the concerns of internal democracy, always denied by the movement. And sometimes it’s Jean-Luc Mélenchon himself who responds: “What problem with internal democracy? Those involved NEVER respected the group’s rules. We endured two years of continuous press leaks, against the line, against this or that comrade without forgetting the plots to go to article 7 of the retirement law to vote on the reform.”
“Conspiracy”, the word, far from being trivial in the mouth of Jean-Luc Mélenchon. The founder of LFI is convinced that a plan was being hatched against him and against the movement he founded. A cabal that François Ruffin, Clémentine Autain, Alexis Corbière, Raquel Garrido, Danielle Simonnet and the socialists would even have cooked up. An old refrain which takes Mélenchon back to his young Trotskyist years, within the OCI, a far-left minority movement with a culture of besieged people, convinced of being hunted by Stalinists (like Léon Trotsky) and the bourgeois. We advanced hidden, often under pseudonyms, and we praised the excess of control, the absence of democracy and the purges, queens within the OIC.
Conspiracy
Its heir, the Independent Workers’ Party (POI), resurfaced around Mélenchon, with his support, during the last legislative elections of 2022. And even more so at the time of the Quatennens affair, when the mysterious far-left party took action and cause for the deputy from the North. A major article was published in his newspaper in defense of this elected official who was being “thrown to the dogs”. At the same time, several local LFI executives from the west and south alert the LFI management of the actions and other threats of local personalities, who have just joined the movement, in the demonstrations and action groups – the “GA ” – scattered across the four corners of the territory. Older activists disrupt rebellious meetings, call for support for the “Quatennens soldier” and denounce “a media-political plot”. “At this time, there is a break between the young activists and the feminists, and an older tendency of LFI which is a member of the POI”, testifies an oil of the movement. The LFI “committee for respect of principles” is even alerted and swears that there is no question of the POI “taking up more space than that” locally.
Rainy wedding, happy marriage, it seems. Except on the left? Monday June 17 in Montreuil, under umbrellas, smiles. The entire left – or almost – of the New Popular Front is gathered for a big rally. Behind the scenes, the squabble between the “NFP” oils, joined by the rebels, and the Mélenchon clan continues. Mathilde Panot insists that Rima Hassan go on stage, to the great dismay of some. François Ruffin said “his full support” to Alexis Corbière to applause… And a few whistles. In the crowd, a small group of rebels and their supporters, including Taha Bouhafs and Youcef Brakni, disrupt Ruffin’s speech. “There is a huge problem in this New Popular Front: there are only white people, considers one of the agitators at L’Express who claims the action of the day before. We have no rebeu who embodies… We are not going to Leave them alone if they don’t make an effort on this issue!”
Ruffin, new favorite target of the leader and his soldiers. “Mélenchon fears him,” say the rebels. On France 3, in the show Sunday in politics, he pushes Ruffin a little further into the presidential ravine: “He is a candidate, everyone understands that. I understood it from the first minute, he told me.” In the ranks of the left, all suspicions are allowed: what if Mélenchon tried to make Ruffin lose in his constituency? Others, more down to earth, are betting on the exclusion of Corbière and Garrido from LFI if they were to win the election and cause the invested LFI candidates to lose.
Digital Army
Mélenchon makes fun of the past with those we call the rebels, the years of friendship with Corbière, the services rendered by Garrido, the crossings of the desert after the departure of the PS in 2008, etc. “They owe me everything!” he has repeated in private for several years. They will have no respite, neither from him nor from the most ecumenical little hands. Alexis Corbière already paid the price on Monday in Montreuil. While the meeting was in full swing, he came to greet Mathilde Panot and took his place next to the Parisian elected official of the PCF, Ian Brossat. The two men have hardly spoken to each other for ten years, since the municipal elections of 2014. At the time, communists and Mélenchonists in the capital had separated against a backdrop of support for Anne Hidalgo for town hall. Brossat says: “I was very happy to be able to speak to him again Monday evening, and we discussed the legislative elections. I asked him about Danielle Simonnet [NDLR : elle aussi purgée], I ask her if it will do it, if she can win. He tells me she’s a bulldozer, she’s going to get there.”
A TF1 camera captures the exchange. The video is then truncated and published by anonymous accounts on social networks. Here is Corbière accused of insulting Mathilde Panot as a “fishwife”. Nothing helps, the strike force of the small digital army of Melenchonie is triggered. Corbière defends himself, shouts into the void. Post-truth in progress. “We are in alternative facts,” laments Brossat to L’Express. The same rebellious little hands don’t stop there. Well helped by the Trotskyists, and supported by the Trotskyist cabbage leaf, they happily unearth a recent investigation by L’Express on Olivier Legrain, the multimillionaire who dreams of saving the left and lends a helping hand to François Ruffin and others. Proof by example of a major conspiracy against Mélenchon, they believe. That’s forgetting the chef’s numerous lunches with some big bankers and other French fortunes over the last two years.
“What Mélenchon does is a repetition of what Lambert [NDLR : dirigeant trotskiste] did in his time, by constantly organizing new purges against the cadres of his party. The leader of LFI has unfortunately preempted this cultural legacy of Lambertist Trotskyism and maintains, like him, a very distended relationship with democracy”, analyzes Laurent Mauduit, a former Trotskyist himself, and co-author with Denis Sieffert of a reference work on this old movement with authoritarian methods which have nothing to envy of those of Jean-Luc Mélenchon today. So many signs which reveal the fragility of the rebellious leader who has just ceded a lot of ground to the socialists and to Glucksmann in the negotiations of the New. Popular Front, in substance as in the number of constituencies; and to François Ruffin who has opened the window for his replacement, and does not intend to close it any time soon.
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