Communist leader Fabien Roussel is walking… Or is he ruminating? His defeat in the legislative elections still lingers in his throat. “If I had not made this alliance, I would have kept my position,” he recently told Parisian. The national secretary of the PCF assures him, if he were to run again, there is no question of joining the Rebels again. Exactly the same for Elsa Faucillon, except that it is exactly the opposite… A fervent defender of the New Popular Front (NFP), the MP for Hauts-de-Seine calls on the left-wing parties to show more proof of love. But do they really want it?
L’Express: “If I had to represent myself, it would not be in an alliance with LFI”, affirmed Fabien Roussel in the columns of Parisian. Does this declaration, without taking into account the tensions between LFI and the socialists, signify the end of the NFP?
Fabien Roussel varies a lot on the subject. I remember recent statements where he explained the opposite. “It’s a brown wave that is sweeping us away,” he even said after his defeat in the legislative elections. And assured that to blame Jean-Luc Mélenchon and the Insoumis for his own defeat was to fail to face the rise of the extreme right… And then Fabien preempts a debate that we must have within the party. How can we imagine that the national leader of a party which received less than 3% in the European elections would suffer from the alliance of the entire left with the New Popular Front? Especially since he gained 4,000 more votes in his constituency. Why does the RN have 12,000 more? That is the subject. He, and all of us on the left, would have had fewer votes without the unity of the left. I know that unity is not enough in itself, but it is a necessary prerequisite.
The June union, the whole union and nothing but the union? Should it be the alpha and omega of all the left’s strategic decisions?
The union above all needs a shared unitary desire. Everyone is aware that it is necessary, but it must be articulated coherently, taking into account the diversity of the left, rather than constantly talking to each other through tweets or newspapers. The left has too much tendency to only speak to itself, to paraphrase itself. Unity is not everything, but it is a guarantee of confidence and credibility for the undecided and the abstainers.
The NFP made the best days of the socialist and environmentalist groups, who almost doubled their number of deputies in July. But obviously not those in your group, which lost nearly 20% of its parliamentarians between 2022 and 2024. Is this alliance not harmful to you?
It should be noted that certain outgoing PCF deputies in historically communist constituencies and towns were defeated. We may not be identified as the architects of this gathering, and we are paying for it. The confusion of ideas carried by the party leadership greatly harms the identification of who the communists are in the political landscape.
In Isère, a partial legislative election must be held and it is the result of strategic battles between LFI and the PS. The first consider that the choice of candidate must be theirs, because this is stated in the agreement. And the latter claim that they are better placed to win. Union or victory?
This is a strategic debate that we should have in a structure where the different components of the NFP sit, and not just the leaders of the four parties… But for a practice of union to exist, there must be a will. In the National Assembly, we are carrying out good collective opposition work, solid, coherent, but that is not enough. We must support the idea of a majority alternative. We must go beyond the four walls of a room or an Assembly in Paris, create a popular dynamic. I am campaigning for NFP collectives to be born everywhere in France and to tackle substantive political battles. The idea is not to look ourselves in the eye and say that the unity of the left is beautiful, but that it is useful for conviction. We cannot imagine that only electoral strategies, sometimes caught on the precipice, will allow us to get out of this situation. There is a huge battle of ideas to be waged on the concerns of the French, from the power to live to the fight against medical deserts, from the collapse of public services to the place of work among the French today, without forgetting discrimination.
On the left, some, including Fabien Roussel, are beginning to question the principle of a single candidacy for 2027…
I challenge anyone to demonstrate to me that we will be able to win divided and separated. But the question arises: will we be able to land on a joint application? I sometimes despair of it.
Fabien Roussel is not the only one to think that the left only addresses the urban electorate, and neglects the rural electorate whose concerns sometimes differ. François Ruffin too, and others, even at the PS. There, the RN vote is very anchored…
I said that Fabien Roussel varied, but he also has a guideline: to stand out from the Insoumis obviously, but also from what are the major struggles of the PCF. In the last European campaign, he and the PCF candidate [NDLR : Leon Deffontaines] made comments on secularism and sovereignty which slipped into reactionary territory. I also think of their reactions during the vile murder of Philippine where they focused on the OQTF rather than the rape culture in the country. By doing this, he is sailing the reactionary sea of the RN. We must hold the trench when there is a fascist risk. If we slip like him, those who already trust us will not follow us. They expect from us the battle for purchasing power as much as the fight against racism. The ambition is to convince as many people as possible and, when you are on the left, the mission is to unify the working classes.
Are RN voters lost in advance?
I don’t know, from one election to another, how a far-right voter can move to the left. The question of scapegoating is structural among those who vote RN. On the other hand, there is no miracle, it requires enormous work to demystify this false idea of welfare and the so-called “migrant overwhelm”. Let us reach out broadly to all residents. While ardently campaigning for a joint candidacy in 2027 (or before), we also have work outside of electoral periods, activist work, in depth, a battle of ideas. I am campaigning with others to make the registers of grievances public; there is a fertile basis for this work.
Some left-wing deputies hesitated to vote for the RN bill aimed at repealing the pension reform, others even saying that they would have voted for it if they were still parliamentarians. What do these hesitations on the left reveal to approve a text emanating from the extreme right?
The debate was indeed not simple, quite simply because it was a trap set by the RN. They don’t care about the repeal of the reform, they are just trying to buy a social veneer. The far right has never been on the side of workers, neither during the fight against pension reform, nor during the yellow vests, nor in the long history of social movements. The RN deputies did not vote for our amendment to remove the reform in the Social Security Financing Bill (PLFSS). Voters asked us to hold the trench, so let’s not break the few levees that remain. Fighting against the extreme right is not just a moral duty, it is a political struggle, particularly for the working classes.
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