The first secretary of the Socialist Party (PS), Olivier Faure, is seeking re-election at the congress scheduled for the end of January 2023, in Marseille. Faced with two competing candidates, he defends the leading role of the Socialists within the New People’s Ecological and Social Union (Nupes).
Why are you running for party leadership?
The fight for the next five years is simple: it is a question of knowing what will be the alternative to the Macronist policy. Will it be the extreme right or the left? My conviction is that ecological socialism is the answer to the major climatic, social and democratic disruptions that we are facing. What I want is to seek victory to change lives.
What is ecological socialism?
Where do we come from ? From the synthesis produced by Jaurès, that of the Social Republic. What would he say to us today? That he was unaware of the consequences of human activity on the planet and that it is obviously necessary to add the ecological dimension to the initial project. Get out of productivism. Growth as we know it is neither sustainable nor bearable. We must first define what our common goods are, and give ourselves the means to preserve them. The pathological pursuit of profit, the hyperconcentration of wealth threaten our social cohesion and contradict the idea of climate justice. We have to get things back in order. First the human and the Earth that feeds him.
For five years, how to grow the left? By working with Emmanuel Macron or by an irreconcilable opposition?
The French have chosen to deprive Jupiter of an absolute majority. We must assume a de facto parliamentarism. In the Assembly and the Senate, we seek to influence government policy. I do not refuse compromises a priori. But the reality is that the current power has not sought any since July and has retained none of our proposals.
Are you going to vote on the renewable energy bill?
The government says it wants to involve us in this project. Anything that goes in the right direction does not deserve blockage, but we have to get out of the logic of communication. The gap between the presidential speeches and the budgetary reality granted to the ecological transition is staggering. Emmanuel Macron is an enarque, he is the man of the great oral. In writing, that is to say in the law, it is very different.
La France insoumise considers that it is necessary to provoke a dissolution to accelerate the seizure of power. And you?
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