2024-01-05 16:30:06
Jean-Luc Mélenchon, during a speech during a meeting for peace and focused on the national and international situation, in Rennes, December 14, 2023. GUILLAUME SOUVANT / AFP
This evening in August 2023, it’s time for a reunion. The socialist deputy for Essonne Jérôme Guedj and Jean-Luc Mélenchon, estranged for fifteen years, have dinner together. A few weeks earlier, the funeral of their mutual friend Bernard Pignerol paved the way to reconciliation. The founder of La France insoumise (LFI) and his former parliamentary advisor, who was for a long time a spiritual son, spend four hours together.
During the meal, Jérome Guedj puts the latest controversy on the table. On July 16, Jean-Luc Mélenchon slipped again, accusing the president of the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions of France (CRIF), Yonathan Arfi, of being “extreme right”, provoking indignation and reactivating the anti-Semitism trial against him. When a “man of the left” East “called an anti-Semite means he is not far from power”he theorized in 2018.
For ten years now, doubts have accompanied Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s provocative outbursts, since he accused Pierre Moscovici, in 2013, of not “not think French”more « finance internationale ». A criticism which evoked an anti-Semitic cliché through the image of the Jewish banker. He justified this exit by claiming to ignore the confession of the man who was then Minister of the Economy of François Hollande. But, little by little, the leader of the first formation on the left attracts the animosity of a large part of the representatives of the Jewish community.
On this summer evening, he persists and signs: these accusations would be made for the “discredit”, he argues to Jérôme Guedj. The latter no longer understands his former mentor and confides in “huge anger” with respect to “someone so intelligent who lays bigger and bigger stones”. “It pushes me to question what should never be questioned”, entrust to Monde the elected socialist, nursed on secularism and who has always refused to “playing the service Jews”.
“The worst is the idea of anti-France”
The socialist and the “rebellious”, united within the New Ecological and Social Popular Union, do not know it, but the massacres of October 7 will soon mark a breaking point. And, for the left alliance, the beginning of a crisis which will lead to implosion.
Firstly because Jean-Luc Mélenchon refuses to qualify Hamas, guilty of abuses against Israeli civilians, as a “terrorist group”. Then because he multiplies ambiguous statements. He accuses Elisabeth Borne, daughter of a Holocaust survivor, of rallying and “foreign point of view”. And Yaël Braun-Pivet, president of the National Assembly, of “camping in Tel Aviv” and not to speak “in the name of the French people”. “The worst is the idea of anti-France: it stinks of the 1930s”, reacts Samuel Lejoyeux, president of the Union of Jewish Students of France, in reference to the old anti-Semitic trope of dual allegiance. On December 3, he once again provoked indignation by calling LCI columnist Ruth Elkrief a “manipulative” and of “fanatic”.
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