PS CONGRESS. The 80th Congress of the Socialist Party (PS) takes place in Marseille from Friday 27 to Sunday 29 January. The future of the party within the Nupes should occupy a central place in the discussions.
[Mis à jour le 27 janvier 2023 à 14h28] The 80th congress of the Socialist Party (PS) begins this Friday, January 27, 2023 in the afternoon in Marseille for a period of three days, until Sunday, January 29. In a party which is still weakened by its catastrophic result in the last presidential election (1.7% of the vote for candidate Anne Hidalgo), and which has found itself in recent days in a succession crisis due to the disputed re-election of Olivier Faure to the post of first secretary, the question of the alliance of the PS within the New Popular Ecological and Social Union (Nupes) should occupy a central place in the debates.
This week was marked by the numerous interventions of Olivier Faure and Nicolas Mayer-Rossignol, who clashed during the second round of the election of the new first secretary of the PS, on January 19th. If Olivier Faure was narrowly re-elected, his rival still does not recognize the results of the second round, despite the fact that a party verification commission returned in detail to the ballot, placing Olivier Faure in the lead with 51.09% votes, against 48.91% for Nicolas Mayer-Rossignol, with a difference of just over 500 votes. These results have also been validated by a bailiff.
Nicolas Mayer-Rossignol and Olivier Faure had both claimed victory after the second round of the election of the new first secretary of the party. Very quickly, the mayor of Rouen (Seine-Maritime) challenged the victory of Olivier Faure. “We saw that there were obvious irregularities and fraud,” he said again on the set of It’s up to you on France 5, Tuesday, January 24, calling for a recount of the votes. Irregularities, there have been some, since 234 disputed ballots were ultimately not taken into account by the verification committee, out of the 23,527 votes cast. “We are 24,000 voters, that’s not a lot. I am the mayor of Rouen, we organize polls every year on a lot of people. I can tell you that, if we organized polls under these conditions, we would be in prison”, assailed Nicolas Mayer-Rossignol on France 5indicating that they would like a new recount of the votes.
The outcome of this arm wrestling should therefore be played out at the 80th congress of the PS, this weekend. The hypothesis of a common direction seems privileged to bring a solution to the conflict. “Let’s make a collegial direction based on the score of the first ballot, which is undisputed, with a special place for Olivier Faure”, proposed Nicolas Mayer-Rossignol, during an interview Wednesday January 25 on Public Senate. For his part, Olivier Faure wrote the same day, in a letter addressed to members of the PS: “I thus proposed to Hélène Geoffroy and Nicolas Mayer-Rossignol to be alongside Johanna Rolland first deputy secretaries of the party, but also to carry out major projects in our collective name, such as the European elections, the transformation of our party or major thematic conventions. “I am open to a collegial animation, but I say it just as clearly: I will not accept to install powerlessness at our head, with a quarteron of four first secretaries”, he nevertheless specified. Not sure that this is to the taste of the mayor of Rouen … The debates between the two camps are still likely to be stormy this weekend. It is indeed during the congress that the socialist delegates, who were elected by the members of each federation of the party, must ratify the result of the election.
During the first round of the election of the new secretary of the PS, the members did not vote for candidates, but for the texts of orientations carried by each of them, which framed their vision of the policy to be carried out in the within the party for the next few years. Olivier Faure’s text won the vote (49.15%), ahead of Nicolas Mayer-Rossignol (30.51%) and Hélène Geoffroy (20.34%).
Olivier Faure has always defended the integration of the PS within the Nupes, and moreover was the main craftsman. For his part, Nicolas Mayer-Rossignol is more on an in-between line. If the mayor of Rouen does not want to take the PS out of the alliance of left-wing parties, he nevertheless intends to change it so that his party is “ally but not aligned”, as recalled TF1 News. Finally, Hélène Geoffroy defended a harder line of rupture with Nupes. Since the texts of Hélène Geoffroy and Nicolas-Mayer Rossignol obtained, if we add them together, results close to that of Olivier Faure, it appears that beyond the name of the new first secretary, it is more broadly the future of the PS within the Nupes which is at stake with this 80th congress in the Marseille city.
During an interview on franceinfo on January 23, Olivier Faure took a first step towards his opponents within the party by returning to the last legislative elections. “I am neither blind nor deaf, and I know that it is a suffering for many of us and that there are many people who have experienced as a form of injustice the fact of not being a candidate for the legislative elections”, he conceded, referring to the fact that people had not been invested by the PS in certain constituencies because a candidate from another Nupes party had been chosen. It remains to be seen whether Olivier Faure will manage to give sufficient guarantees to his colleagues to calm the tensions around Nupes during this congress.
In the midst of strong social protest against the pension reform, the crisis within the PS arouses the concern of the members of La France insoumise, who fear a break-up of the left alliance created last May in view of the legislative elections. “At the moment, we need to be united, and it’s true for the socialist party”, estimated, during an interview on France 2 on January 24, the rebellious deputy Clémentine Autain. She also said she was “a little sad to see what’s going on there”. “Olivier Faure is weakened, it is worrying, it is not good news for Nupes which finds itself in difficulty”, also declared to AFPin private, a tenor from the LFI group.
The rebels, who dominate in terms of political weight within the left alliance, have reason to worry. During her campaign before the first round of the election of the new first secretary of the party, Hélène Geoffroy particularly targeted the alliance of the PS with LFI because of her integration into Nupes. “The next congress of the PS will be an opportunity to put a stop to this drift, to suspend the participation of socialists in the Nupes, to give back to the left the ideological corpus allowing it to unite in clarity”, she said at the beginning of November, according to comments reported by The Dispatch.