Promoter of an electoral alliance cobbled together in haste in May 2022 to win a majority of seats in the National Assembly, Jean-Luc Mélenchon waited almost two months to pronounce, on November 30, 2023, in Rochefort (Charente- Maritime), the death certificate of the New Popular, Ecological and Social Union (Nupes). The bloody attack by Hamas against Israel on October 7, which La France insoumise (LFI), unlike Europe Ecologie-Les Verts (EELV), the French Communist Party (PCF) and the Socialist Party (PS), had refused to qualify as terrorist, swept aside the last pretenses of a union already in agony. “There are no more Nupes, ended up recognizing the triple candidate for the Elysée. So we pretend that there is one after all. (…) What we have built is already destroyed. »
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The entire left wants to be internationalist. However, for a century, and the Tours congress of December 1920, where the minority of the SFIO bowed to the majority who, by joining the Third Communist International, had given birth to the PCF, the divide has not ceased. to grow up between two lefts on international politics. “There is a real ideological disagreement on the international level between a reformist left and a radical left which have no not the same vision of the world, from Europe and the United States », explains Marc Lazar, historian and sociologist.
Examples abound in history. In 1936, with the advent of the Popular Front, the two lefts were reconciled, by the will of the USSR. The PCF does not denounce Léon Blum’s refusal to intervene alongside the Spanish Republicans, but it stands out by campaigning for “cannons, planes for Spain”. In December of the same year, his deputies abstained when Blum demanded a vote on his foreign policy. And the party openly embarks on the adventure of the International Brigades.
Basic disagreements
Until the disappearance of the USSR, the PCF will remain, with rare exceptions, subservient to Moscow. Thus the party celebrates, in opposition to the SFIO, although fractured over pacifism, the German-Soviet pact, signed on August 23, 1939, judging that the action of the USSR “contributes to strengthening general peace”, which will result in its ban. On May 4, 1947, at the dawn of the Cold War, the PCF’s support for the USSR led the president of the socialist council, Paul Ramadier, to exclude communist ministers. In 1956, the PCF condemned the decision of the socialist Guy Mollet to participate in the Suez expedition against Egypt with the United Kingdom and Israel. On the Algerian war, the left is struggling to unite. The communists do not join François Mitterrand who, as Minister of the Interior in November 1954, proclaimed that “Algeria is France” and who, in 1957, Keeper of the Seals, gave an unfavorable opinion to the pardon of Fernand Iveton, a communist activist sentenced to death. However, in 1956, defending not independence but “ peace in Algeria », the PCF votes special powers to Guy Mollet. The harshness of the repression then led him to support the independence cause of the Algerian FLN and to campaign, like the socialists later, for independence.
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2024-01-23 16:03:58
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