Bad luck for the Minister of the Interior. A few days after the disastrous final at the Stade de France, then the police throwing tear gas on passengers at the Gare de l’Est in Paris, it is now the Council of State which is putting Gérald Darmanin under pressure. In a summary dated Monday, the highest administrative court “enjoins the Minister of the Interior to take into consideration the Nupes (the New Popular, Ecological and Social Union) as a political nuance in its own right in the presentation of the results which will be made of the legislative elections of June 12 and 19, 2022.
Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s alliance had filed an appeal to denounce the classification of political “nuances” proposed by Place Beauvau, which is used to count the results of the legislative elections. If the presidential majority appears there grouped under the same banner (“Together!”), this is not the case for the forces composing the Nupes. However, astonished the Council of State in a press release, the Nupes “brings together the main parties and political formations of the left around a shared program and single candidacies in all the constituencies”. The judge remarks that the ecologists belonging to this movement are brought together by the Ministry of the Interior with the ecologists who are not part of it.
Jean-Luc Mélenchon hastens to celebrate a “victory”
The executive takes the hit. “The Ministry of the Interior will modify the grid of shades in order to create the Nupes shade”, reacted Place Beauvau in a laconic way. Jean-Luc Mélenchon, he hastened to celebrate a “victory”. “Darmanin and Macron must stop their hacks and shenanigans,” he denounced. “The rough manipulations of the Minister of the Interior have just taken the wall of the Council of State”, added the communist Ian Brossat. Until now, the majority defended the system of differentiated nuances by explaining that “Together! is structured like a party, with common statutes and funding, unlike Nupes.
“From a legal point of view, this argument was ineffective, defends a lawyer close to Jean-Luc Mélenchon. The subject was about political nuances, not questions of financing public life. The judge considered that the presentation which exploded the results of the Nupes between several parties harmed the sincerity of the second round since it played on the political atmosphere of the debate between the two rounds. »
Around Jean-Luc Mélenchon, we had decided very early on to lead this fight: “We knew that we would win at least the media part, by imposing the idea that there is a single group called Nupes, explains a relative. On the legal level, we said to ourselves that we had a 70% chance of winning, that it would be a breakthrough in case law. The services of the Ministry of the Interior had to propose this system to Darmanin, who must have said to himself that no one ever appealed against the nuances. The minister wanted to show off. »
In the majority, we would have done well without this setback, before the ballot. “It will not change much: the calculations of the various political forces, the journalists would have made them anyway”, relativizes a candidate for the legislative elections. “It’s a goal in the cages of Darmanin, one more, creaks on his side a ministerial adviser. He played, but it didn’t hold up against the right. »