Jean-Luc Melenchon. /
Legislative in France
The agreement reached with 62% of the votes arouses harsh criticism from former President Hollande and other historical leaders
The national council of the French Socialist Party (PS) approved this morning with 62% of the votes the alliance agreement with La Francia Insumisa, Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s populist left-wing party, for the legislative elections on 12 and 19 December. June. There were 167 votes in favour, 101 against and 23 abstentions.
Before the vote, the first secretary of the PS, Olivier Faure, urged the Socialists to approve the alliance with Mélenchon’s party. «The relegated president is called Emmanuel Macron. This is not a debate between Jean-Luc Mélenchon and us, but whether Emmanuel Macron has all the powers or if there is an alternative to propose to the French,” said the socialist leader five weeks before the legislative elections.
“If by dint of having debates between the left and the left as our only obsession, if it is our only record, then the only alternative to Emmanuel Macron and the liberals will be the extreme right,” Faure warned at a tense meeting of the national council of the .
Socialists and “mélenchonistas” reached a pre-agreement on Wednesday on the distribution of constituencies and on various points of the program for the legislative ones, such as, for example, retirement at 60 years of age and a minimum salary of 1,400 euros per month. This agreement had to be validated by the PS’s national council, the party’s parliament, made up of the first secretary of the Socialist Party and some 300 party members.
La Francia Insumisa, the equivalent of Podemos in France, had already reached similar agreements days before with Europa-Ecología Los Verdes (EELV), the Communist Party (PCF) and Generations of the former socialist Benoît Hamon.
In contrast, the far-left New Anti-Capitalist Party (NPA) today refused to participate in a left-wing union that includes the Socialist Party.
In the presidential elections in April, the left-wing parties ran separately and failed to see any of their candidates qualify for the second round. Now they will present themselves together to the legislative elections under the label “New Popular Ecological and Social Union” (NUPES) with the aim of obtaining the largest possible number of left-wing deputies in the National Assembly.
For the legislative elections, the leftist union will present a single candidate for each district, in order to avoid competing with each other at the polls and thus achieve a greater number of seats. This is the first time that the leftist parties present single candidates for the first round. Generally, the alliances were made in the second round to avoid, for example, a victory of the extreme right in a constituency.
Of the 577 seats in the National Assembly that are at stake in the legislative elections, La France Insumisa will present candidates in some 350 constituencies, the ecologists in 100, the socialists in 70 and the communists in 50 constituencies.
The agreement for an alliance with Mélenchon has aggravated the internal crisis of the PS, since many militants were opposed to said agreement. Heavyweights of the party, such as Hollande, opposed the alliance with Mélenchon for the legislative elections. Former Prime Minister Bernard announced on Wednesday that he was leaving the party. Instead, Martine Aubry, mayor of Lille and a former minister, on Thursday urged Socialists to support the PS-LFI deal, even though she does not share the Eurosceptic Mélenchon’s ideas on the European Union.
Mélenchon, with 22% of the vote, was the leftist candidate with the most votes in the first round of the presidential elections. Anne Hidalgo, the socialist candidate, only obtained 1.74% of the votes, a historic blow for the party that governed France with François Mitterrand and François Hollande.