Welcome to the first constituency of Ariège, around Foix. It has been at least a hundred years since a right-wing MP was elected there. Even in bad years, in 1968, 1993 or 2017, voters have always chosen a left-wing MP, and often largely. The LFI-Nupes / PS dissident duel which is announced this Sunday, in the second round of a partial legislative (organized after the cancellation of the June ballot), confirms the exotic character of the region, in a country where it is more than ten years since any left-wing candidate has made it to the second round of a presidential election.
And yet, it is the tragedy. Because the outgoing LFI, Bénédicte Taurine (who is not affected by the cancellation of the previous ballot), faces an anti-Nupes socialist dissident, Martine Froger, breaking the ban with the national leadership. In the wake of Carole Delga, president of the Occitanie region, the socialists of Ariège are particularly opposed to the strategy of alliance with the rebellious. Moreover in June, another PS dissident, Laurent Panifous, beat the outgoing LFI deputy from the second constituency (Pamiers), Michel Larrive.
“An extremely radical opposition”
Panifous, who sits in the group of various left and various right Liot deputies (Freedom, independents, overseas and territories), is campaigning for Froger and confirms: “We are a territory in resistance, and it is bearing fruit. In the Assembly, I try to bring a constructive opposition, not subservient to LFI, with which we share nothing. The Ariège deputy thus hopes to prove that one can be on the left outside of Nupes, and describes LFI as “an extremely radical opposition at the national and local level. They oppose all projects! We want to develop the territory, not them. »
A repeat of the June episode in the second constituency of Ariège has a real chance of happening, because all that the constituency has of voters less on the left than Bénédicte Taurine has the opportunity to ” become LFI”. “It’s going to be very tight”, recognizes, a bit worried, a member of the management of rebellious France, already seeing in the result of the first round a kind of anti-LFI coalition: Martine Froger has won 8 points since June, when the Macronist candidate lost 9, falling to only 11%. The presidential majority is also not mistaken and sees there a good way to drive a wedge in the Nupes by calling, from Sunday evening, to vote for Martine Froger. A strategy which, as some think, like the Toulouse LFI deputy Hadrien Clouet, will cause his downfall.
“Spiel”
“She did not win”, assures, confident, the first secretary of the PS, Olivier Faure. But at Nupes, we are already trying to put a possible victory for Martine Froger into perspective. “Extrapolating the result seems incongruous and random to me: it’s Ariège, not France,” explains PS election specialist Pierre Jouvet. There aren’t many constituencies in France where the left can have two candidates in the second round, we won’t be able to draw any conclusions…” However, the PS, like the entire Nupes, is struggling with press releases to support Bénédicte Taurine . Jean-Luc Mélenchon himself had made the trip before the first round.
Because it is a question at all costs of preventing the idea of a left excluding Nupes from developing. “The alternative to the union of the left is bullshit,” stings an environmentalist. The element of language is spotted at will: “If we break the Nupes, we break the possibility of having 151 deputies on the left, without whom the pension reform would have been widely voted”, assures Olivier Faure. Whatever the result of Sunday, the atmosphere is therefore not for a change in general strategy.
Party in the party
One question could nevertheless create an uproar: where would MEP Froger sit if she wins? The internal opposition to Olivier Faure at the PS recalls that she sent a letter in which she said she wanted to sit within the socialist group. “She opportunely sent this letter before the National Council which was to rule on her case. But she wants to go to Liot, ”analyzes the first secretary of the PS. “It is the Socialist deputies who will have the upper hand, anyway. I don’t see the consistency of being against Nupes and coming to a group that bears in its name ”member of the Nupes intergroup””, eludes Pierre Jouvet. ” It will never happen ! “, swept Mathilde Panot on Tuesday, marking all her confidence in Olivier Faure and Boris Vallaud, the president of the socialist group.
At the end of the socialist congress in Marseilles, at the end of January, certain leaders of rebellious France found that Olivier Faure did not take his side and had been wrong to compose with the Nupes-skeptical socialists around Nicolas Mayer-Rossignol. Today, at least officially, no one criticizes the deputy of Seine-et-Marne: “He did the job, took the necessary positions, asked Martine Froger to withdraw… He did everything he could do”, insists Hadrien Clouet. And then “it’s Occitania, it’s Carole Delga”, we hear here and there.
Carole Delga who is beginning to be a party within the party at the PS. “It’s strong: at the congress, she managed to mobilize alone more than 10% of the activists who voted in the country, if we look at the results in Occitania”, analyzes a strategist from the Faure camp. “We know all that”, sweeps Pierre Jouvet, considering that a victory for Froger would not change anything in the internal situation at the PS. Lamia El Aaraje, one of the spokespersons for Nicolas Mayer-Rossignol’s current, seems all the same to have already ordered bottles of whey: “It is all the same absurd that the leadership of the Socialist Party is asking a socialist to withdraw! But if the socialist group believes it is strong enough to do without one more deputy…”