The Socialist Party votes for a “moratorium” on the Nupes: towards the final crisis of the left alliance?

2023-10-18 05:20:19

If the Nupes death certificate is not made official, the left alliance is indeed in its death throes. This Tuesday evening, on the occasion of the national council of the socialist party (the party’s Parliament), its First Secretary Olivier Faure obtained the vote for a “moratorium on his participation in the work of Nupes”, the alliance which brings together since May 2022 socialists, communists, ecologists and rebels. In question ? The repeated refusals of Jean-Luc Mélenchon and several LFI executives to qualify the Hamas attack as “terrorist”. “This series of mistakes has become unbearable” denounced Faure in his speech.

At the end of five hours of sometimes heated debate, at past 1 a.m., the approximately 300 members of the national council therefore validated by a little more than 54% the management text which marks a clear distancing, two days later a PCF resolution which called for “a new type of union” describing the Nupes as a “dead end”. Olivier Faure’s internal opponents did not manage to submit to a vote a harsher text in which they asked the national council to “suspend” the participation of the PS in “any framework of joint collective action with LFI”.

In his introductory speech, the boss of the PS gave a history of the crises which have shaken the Nupes over the last 18 months: Quatennens affair, divergent strategy during the debate on pension reform, comments on the police after the death of Nahel… ” We did not sign up for permanent bordelization. We are here to govern and transform,” criticized Faure, accusing Jean-Luc Mélenchon of “conflicting at every turn”.

“Not union on any conditions”

If the PS did not formally put Nupes to death, Mélenchon had done so earlier in the morning. “Olivier Faure is breaking up Nupes for personal matters concerning me,” the three-time presidential candidate denounced on X shortly after the announcement of the moratorium by the socialist on France Inter. A little later, the president of the LFI group in the Assembly Mathilde Panot said she was “dismayed” and denounced the use of “a pretext” to break up the union. “It is not serious to explain by a personal problem, I cite “the Mélenchon method”, their departure, apparently desired, from Nupes” she underlined.

In the voted text, the socialists reaffirm their attachment to the union of the left and environmentalists. “I am not asking for less unity, I am asking for more unity. But not union on any conditions,” recalled Faure. The PS thus wishes to “build a new working framework”, affirms that “there are no irreconcilable lefts” and proposes to open “two clarification projects”: the first to resolve disagreements, the second to clean up the functioning of Nupes. “I believe in the need for a radical change in the way of conceiving the union” warns Faure.

Faced with this imminent end of the Nupes, at least in its initial version, the environmental group in the Assembly is playing the emergency role. He proposed this Tuesday to bring together “as quickly as possible” the 151 deputies of the alliance to try to talk again and overcome differences. This new day of crisis, marked by the Obono controversy, also revived disagreements within LFI between Mélenchonists and rebels. “The general staffs are in failure. Jean-Luc Mélenchon put fry on the line and it is a mistake, criticizes LFI MP Raquel Garrido. He must benefit from our gratitude but we also have the right to say: thank you for letting us do better.”