“Not having put safeguards to prevent the RN from voting the motion of censure of the Nupes was a mistake”

Ln October 24, after the New Popular Ecological and Social Union (Nupes) had tabled a motion of censure against the government of Elisabeth Borne, Jean-Luc Mélenchon welcomed this show of force on Twitter: “It lacked 50 votes to eject the government. » He then ignored the major fact of this new political failure: the unanimous support of the deputies of the National Rally (RN). Thus, the motion of censure of the Nupes – which collected 239 votes – had to count on the reinforcement of the weight of the deputies of the far right, since they alone represented more than a third of these votes (37%). .

The leader of La France insoumise (LFI) and his relatives have been claiming for ” take [avec eux] anyone who wants to join” the upcoming motions of censure, denouncing the “operetta oppositions” who would not follow this line, according to a strategy of intimidation of which they are customary. However, how can we congratulate ourselves on such a result and support such a strategy when we are viscerally on the left and have always been involved in the political fight against the far right?

Because the position vis-à-vis the far right has once again become one of the most burning political questions of the moment. In several countries of the European Union, xenophobic, authoritarian, anti-feminist and anti-homosexual parties govern and implement their reactionary agenda. The rest of the world is not spared, as evidenced by the United States and Brazil – where the duel between Jair Bolsonaro and Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva finally turned to the advantage of the latter.

Ordinary opinions

In France, thanks to a strategy of demonization, recently undermined by the racist remarks made by the deputy (RN) of Gironde Grégoire de Fournas, on November 3, at the National Assembly, the extreme right is gradually being imposed, in the media and then in the polls, as a major political current, to such an extent that nauseous and dangerous fantasies, such as that of the “great replacement” or the confusion between immigration, Islam and insecurity, can today today be expressed as ordinary opinions and contaminate even the traditional right.

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This real risk of seeing the far right come to power in France imposes the greatest clarity on the left. Its entire history, from the end of the 19^e century, is crossed by these moments when, notwithstanding its fight for more equality, it had to defend the fundamentals of liberal democracy. It was Jean Jaurès who, against the anti-bourgeois rhetoric of the socialist Jules Guesde, defended Dreyfus against the extreme right. It was Léon Blum who, against the class against class logic of the Communist Party of the 1920s and, after the anti-parliamentary demonstrations of February 6, 1934, defended the Republic in danger.

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