For Bernard Cazeneuve, “another left is possible”. The former Prime Minister, opposed to the agreement between PS and LFI within Nupes, believes above all that it is necessary to “break with excess and sectarianism”, in a manifesto published in the JDD.
The text is signed by 400 personalities on the left, including almost all of the opponents of the pro-Nupes line of PS boss Olivier Faure: the mayor of Le Mans Stéphane Le Foll, the former PS Prime Secretary Jean-Christophe Cambadélis or the leader of the minority current Hélène Geoffroy, mayor of Vaulx-en-Velin. On the other hand, the president of the Occitanie region Carole Delga or the former presidential candidate Anne Hidalgo did not affix their signature.
Oppositions animated “by radicalism”
Bernard Cazeneuve, who left the PS after the Nupes agreement, believes that “neither the anemic relative majority (of the macronists), nor the oppositions mainly driven by radicalism seem to be able to meet the expectations of our compatriots”. “It would be wrong to be satisfied with the grandiloquent postures of insubordination, by accepting the marriage of inconsistency and violence, in a nihilism where anger would prevent the advent of hope”.
In this context, “it is therefore up to us, republicans of the left and wherever we come from, to organize ourselves to gather our forces (…) in order to give back to the French the hope to which they are entitled”, writes again Bernard Cazeneuve. He therefore launches “a call for refoundation and therefore for the constitution of a collective dynamic”.
The “Anti-Barbecue International”
In an interview, also in the JDD, the former head of government also affirms that “if what we believe to be just attracts interest, a movement will be created, and we will make it a useful force to bring together as widely as possible all those who are despairing of the shrinking of the left to its most sectarian fringes, now symbolized by the great International of the fight against the barbecue”. And he tackles: “the left is under the domination of Jean-Luc Mélenchon and the management of the PS has let itself be ‘toutouiser'”.
Among the signatories of the manifesto are also several former socialist ministers (Christian Eckert, Frédéric Cuvillier, Jean Glavany, Michel Sapin or Catherine Trautmann), PS mayors, the president of the Brittany region Loïg Chesnais-Girard, “dissident” deputies from the Nupes, presidents of departments, and even members of the PRG, including its president Guillaume Lacroix.
For her part, Anne Hidalgo, who does not support the Nupes agreement, considered that “the PS will no longer be what it was, will not be as before, but there is always a future and a history”, during of a speech at the back-to-school university of the Socialist Federation of Paris. “This voice must not be hidden,” she said, explaining that she “never had shameful socialism”.