May the lefts seem irreconcilable when the components of the new Popular Front specify their own geopolitical doctrine! Among these differences, highlighted in the National Assembly on March 3 according to the debate without vote on the situation in Ukraine, the report of the various training courses with European defense, the community dimension of French nuclear deterrence, but also aid to Ukraine. Giving to see two visions of the world on the antipodes on the bas. “There is, on this conflict, a fracture on the left between ‘European entrepreneurs’ and ‘promoters of sovereignty’, analyzes Samuel Faure, researcher at the CNRS Spring laboratory, specialist in European Union governance, transformations of armaments policies in Europe. The former will tend to invest in European devices that are both intergovernmental and supranational legitimate the strictly intergovernmental instruments, considering that defense is a case which must remain the monopoly of nation states. ” An exacerbated cleavage over the past two weeks, while the White House, which has just freeze military aid to kyiv, concretizes its disengagement from the conflict at the gates of Europe.
“Munichois” against “go-war”
The differences in geopolitical analysis are not new. The programs of the NUPS and the New Popular Front (NFP) make, moreover, more or less, the dead end on these subjects. “It was impossible to decide as our disagreements were great,” recalls one of the negotiators. Thus, the first version of the Alliance on the left is content to plead for the defense of “sovereignty and freedom of Ukraine and the Ukrainian people as well as the integrity of its borders”. And to sleep on paper disagreements with regard to the withdrawal or maintenance of France in NATO: points, they said, “put to the wisdom of the assembly”. Two years later, the impasse is similar in the NFP program: this time, the organization of the North Atlantic Treaty was not even mentioned. The latest presidential and European deadlines, since the start of the war on the continental soil, have been marked by intestine quarrels on the left, where one and the other are invective, sometimes in “Munich”, sometimes in “go-to-war”. “This is a predominant point among the background debates inside the left, admits Christian Picquet, thinking head of the French Communist Party (PCF). What must be the contribution of France to the new world order of peace and collective security?”
According to the typology defined by Samuel Faure, socialists and environmentalists belong to the first category. “The most demanding pacifism, that of Jaurès, does not tolerate either servitude or submission,” warned the boss of socialist deputies Boris Vallaud. At the gallery of the National Assembly, the latter pleaded for a “major strategic recovery plan of Europe, which will be military as much as it is industrial”, and for a “great common loan of at least 500 billion”. And to assume that “nuclear deterrence will obviously be one of the major questions of the construction of common European security”, finally calling for referral to frozen Russian assets to finance the Ukrainian resistance and stop leaving “transit by our ports, with the complicity of our businesses, its liquefied natural gas”. Honey for the ears of Raphaël Glucksmann, a long -standing supporter of the realization of a European defense. “The American umbrella has closed. ‘Europe-Tanguy’ which dreamed of staying in the house of Uncle Sam Ad Vitam Aeternam is today all alone outside, “deplores the old head of the PS public list. With the Greens, the convergence of view is strong.” It’s been a long time that we have sounds alarm, blows the ecological MEP Marie Toussaint. Yes at the end of our dependencies, especially Russian gas. Yes to a more integrated Europe, including the defense. Yes to the opening of the French nuclear umbrella on Europe. The only reasonable perspective is nuclear disarmament, but it is not the slope that the world takes. “
Insoumis and communists would therefore belong to the second category of this typology. Resolutely opposed to the sharing of French deterrence, the freezing of Russian assets by virtue of respect for international law, the radical left parties are mostly working to underline the presumed dead end of a military solution to the conflict. “They offer Europe of Defense, we offer Europe of peace”, replies the deputy LFI Hadrien Clouet, responsible for “the future in common”. “This program is intended to become a hub of the Americans,” said the elected official, stressing that a large part of the member states provide militarily across the Atlantic. Christian Picquet says nothing else: “You have to choose an independent policy in France and in Europe, and not replace the Americans to conduct a war policy in their place.”
The two political parties mainly want to see in these upheavals the confirmation of their historically anti -American positions. “From the start, Europeans have never wondered why Russia acted, nor what ways to avoid war were possible. […] They stretched the elastic as much as they could in total indifference to the reality of the power relations of the new world order, “wrote Jean-Luc Mélenchon in His latest blog note. There too, Fabien Roussel, the boss of the PCF, converges with the triple presidential candidate, when he calls to “hear what Russia requires: the non-integration of Ukraine in NATO”.
“” “The new story of the White House calls into question the dogmas of the radical left»
The alignment of the White House with the interests of the Kremlin, however, allows the different shades of the left, from Raphaël Glucksmann to Jean-Luc Mélenchon, to agree on one point: the need to turn the page of dependence in the United States. “This discord, very strong in our camp, is no longer,” said Clémentine Autain, deputy of the Ecologist and Social group, which sits within the Foreign Affairs Committee. This is a break, and we are at a time when the doctrine of the New World is looking for. “
“The geopolitical tilting operates transformations in political demand, before the supply is structured”, analyzes Gilles Gressani, director of the journal The great continent. A question notably asked on the sovereignist left. “The fact that Donald Trump has assumed an explicitly imperial discourse for a month by humiliating his allies and going so far as to express his will of a territorial expansion confirms what a good part of the left always believed: that the United States was only an Empire which was hiding, he says. This transformation however poses a difficult question on the left: that of power.” And the teacher at Sciences Po question: “If the only rule of the empires will be the Hard Power, Do our nations only have sufficient means to resist the vice that is tightening on Europe? This is a question that has a corollary for all those who claim to be sovereignism: taken between Russia, China and the United States, what State has the means of military and digital autonomy? “
If the radical lefts ensure that they had the long -standing alarm sound, they are nonetheless forced to rethink their software. “The new story of the White House calls into question a dogma particularly present on the far left according to which the European Union is only an instrument of American domination. Today, Trump repeats in an almost obsessive way all the opposite: the EU would have been created to destroy the United States …”, adds Gilles Gressani, for whom the new gives “breaks the fantasy analysis of a part of the left which has sometimes seen in the Putin regime anti -American “. “The convergence between the White House and the Kremlin surprises almost everyone by its depth, including in Russia, because it rewrites the history of the end of the Cold War,” he concludes.
Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who has long advocated a rapprochement with Russia without believing in the Ukrainian invasion, has since moderated his positions, supporting the Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, without however abandoning the thesis of a NATO provocation. Gilles Gressani noted, in the last publication of the rebellious, that the interested party “hardly does not approach the question of American alignment on Russia, as if he had not yet found a line in front of this vice which sees Trump and Putin advance on a common front”. “Meeting of Europeans in the country alone from the EU. And the most directly linked to the USA. European sovereignty ‘is bogus,” said the rebellious leader about the meeting of European allies in kyiv in London. The initiative did not convince the Patriarch LFI. He continues to preach for “the release of NATO, non-alignment and alter-globalism of mutual aid”.
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