A high-tension return to school. The Socialist Party is launching its summer days in Blois this Thursday in a context of internal disagreements over the strategy to be implemented with regard to Emmanuel Macron, who is in the midst of a search for a Prime Minister after having excluded a government of the New Popular Front (NFP) led by Lucie Castets. The latter, who has already participated in the universities of the Ecologists, the Communists and the Insoumis, will be in Blois the next day for a “major interview”.
The unsuccessful NFP candidate for Matignon promised in West France to “continue to work for the unity of the left, to continue the in-depth work carried out over the past month, to carry the voices of the millions of voters who voted for the New Popular Front”. But his presence will not prevent the divergences within the PS from coming to light, after a short period of calm and unity at the time of the European elections, around Raphaël Glucksmann.
After heated discussions on Tuesday within a national office, opponents of First Secretary Olivier Faure intend to make their voices heard to express their discontent with his line. The latest to speak out, the president of Occitanie and Regions of France Carole Delga estimated in our columns that the head of state “has the right to refuse” Lucie Castets but “the duty to choose” a personality from the left bloc to lead the government. The left must present an “action plan”, the basis for a search for “non-censorship alliances” in the National Assembly, she added.
“A storm in a teacup”
The leader of the socialists refused, like the other parties of the New Popular Front, to return to the Élysée to discuss the appointment of a Prime Minister other than Lucie Castets. But for his opponents, such as the mayor of Vaulx-en-Velin Hélène Geoffroy and the mayor of Rouen Nicolas Mayer-Rossignol, who regularly accuse him of being too close to the Insoumis, it is a mistake.
They are demanding that the PS continue to participate in the discussions and are calling for a government led by a left-wing personality outside the NFP not to be censured a priori, considering that it could still carry out some left-wing measures.
Especially since among the names mentioned in the press as a potential tenant of Matignon is the former Prime Minister Bernard Cazeneuve, who left the PS after the agreement on the left-wing alliance Nupes, in May 2022, which gave pride of place to La France insoumise. But for the leadership, as for the PS deputies, the line is clear: censorship of any government that would be an extension of Macronist policy, including that led by Cazeneuve.
“It’s a storm in a teacup triggered by people who invent a world that doesn’t exist, a parallel world where a left-wing Prime Minister with left-wing measures would be supported by Macron,” says MEP Christophe Clergeau.
“We always replay the same sequence”
Hélène Geoffroy, Nicolas Mayer-Rossignol, and their allies, including Carole Delga, have planned to meet on Friday. For Olivier Faure’s close associates, this is clearly a new Congress ahead of time that is being played out, after the particularly explosive one in Marseille in 2023. The PS was torn apart over the Nupes, which Olivier Faure defended. He finally won by a very narrow margin (51%).
“We’re always playing the same sequence,” laments MP Laurent Baumel, stressing that Olivier Faure’s opponents “yet voted for the creation of the New Popular Front,” with LFI. But “they don’t want to admit that Olivier Faure could have political success” after the European and legislative elections that saw the socialist group double the number of its MPs.
Olivier Faure explains in Libération to have the feeling that since the result of the legislative elections, behavior has relaxed, “as if the threat had disappeared and it was possible to resume our bad habits.”
Among the NFP partners, they are carefully scrutinizing what is happening within the party with the rose: “We are not worried,” a member of the LFI leadership assured AFP. “It is not new that a part of the PS dreams of an under-secretary of state for Mr. Macron.” By doing this, they would put themselves “at odds with the NFP voters,” he added. Which is conceded by a socialist MP: “We have not made all these efforts to return to the heart of the left, and end up becoming social traitors again.”
