During the truce, the great maneuvers continue. Thirteen days before the members’ vote for the first round of the Socialist Party congress, the mayor of Nantes Johanna Rolland announces that she will be number 2 if the outgoing first secretary Olivier Faure is reappointed. “I accepted his proposal to become first deputy national secretary if we have the majority after the vote of the militants”, indicates in an interview with the Sunday newspaper the one who led the campaign of Anne Hidalgo for the presidential election of 2022. .
“I am not one of those who desert in the face of difficulty”, explains Johanna Rolland, who intends to “contribute to the reconstruction” of the PS, now tied to the Nupes alliance with LFI, EELV and the PCF. Since the start of Nupes, which she supported unlike Anne Hidalgo, the mayor of Nantes approves of the choice of Olivier Faure to have concluded this agreement and denounces his detractors. She had thus distanced herself last September from former Prime Minister Bernard Cazeneuve who had published a manifesto for “another left”.
This time, it is to François Hollande that she addresses a tackle. According to her, the former socialist president must “stop playing against his camp, repeating wrongly that the PS is not working. When one was the last Socialist President of the Republic, one cannot exonerate oneself from everything. »
A debate on January 6
The three candidates running for the head of the socialist party, the outgoing Olivier Faure and his two opponents the mayor of Vaulx-en-Velin Hélène Geoffroy and the mayor of Rouen Nicolas Mayer-Rossignol, will face off during a televised debate on Friday 6 January. Their orientation texts will be submitted to the vote of the members on January 12th. A second vote, on January 19, will decide between the two remaining candidates, before a congress on the 25th in Marseille.
Asked about the candidacy of Nicolas Mayer-Rossignol, supported by Anne Hidalgo, Johanna Rolland said she did not “understand” it. “We cannot be for Nupes and at the same time against Nupes”, she asserts, marking her difference a little more with the mayor of Paris. But “for the future, when the militants have decided on the line, we will have to know how to come together”.