It has become a national sport: betting on the break-up of the New People’s Ecological and Social Union (Nupes) with each somewhat dissonant speech by one of the leaders of the parties in the alliance. In this game, it is true that Fabien Roussel never deprives himself. Latest episode: last weekend, at the Fête de l’Humanité, the national secretary of the French Communist Party (PCF) made a strong statement by declaring that “the left must defend work and wages and not be the left of allowances, social minima and substitute income”. Understood: the Nupes does not value work enough in its speeches. “A man on the left who draws a generally positive balance sheet from the legislative elections when there are 89 RN deputies has a bit of poo in his eyes,” added the deputy from the North.
While until then, the tendency was rather to minimize disagreements when there were any, the leaders of rebellious France, but also of the rest of the Nupes, raised their voices. “We must not oppose those who are in employment and those who are not”, judge Léa Balage El Mariky, at EELV. And for the socialist Olivier Faure, “a Republic of Labor” is not incompatible with “the protection of unemployment insurance”. Back to LFI, where Fabien Roussel is criticized for taking up the words and arguments of the right when the government is returning to the charge with its unemployment insurance reform.
The union against Roussel
Even among the communist troops, we cough loudly. “Communist colleagues came to tell me not to worry, that it would not be the position of their group during the debate on the reform of unemployment insurance”, blows a socialist deputy who judges that Roussel “no longer knows where he lives” and “is weakening in his party”. In this context, Ian Brossat, PCF deputy at the Paris City Hall and former campaign director for Fabien Roussel in the presidential election, takes great care to give unit pledges: “We do not want to distance ourselves from Nupes, not at all ! “Contrary to Fabien Roussel, he even speaks of” incontestably positive balance sheet “of the legislative ones for Nupes.
The deputy from the North is therefore – paradoxically – almost unanimously against him by the alliance. An alliance whose existence is never called into question by most interlocutors, whether they are socialists, ecologists or communists, warmly pro-Nupes or lukewarm. The mark of its precious and fragile character, everyone being well aware that without it, the very question of their disappearance from the Assembly was raised.
The point that hurts
Communist Ian Brossat warns: “We are alive, but not winners. He then raises the question of the limits of the Nupes strategy, asking what the left lacks to win. “The results are very good in the metropolises, it’s very good, it’s not a question of lowering our guard on this. But they are less good in peripheral France, where the National Rally makes substantial scores. He thus partly joins the warning of the rebellious deputy of Amiens, François Ruffin, on the weakness of the left in rural areas.
Because that’s where the shoe pinches: in the 2022 elections, the voices of the left were concentrated – even more than usual – in the big cities. It’s not new, but it’s accelerating. To the point that rural bastions of the left – there are some – such as the Dordogne or the Landes voted less in this direction than the rest of the country in the first round of the presidential election… Less on the left also than the Yvelines or the Hauts-de -Seine, urban departments and well-known bastions of the right. In an interview with 20 minutes in July, the president of the socialist group, Boris Vallaud, himself a member of the Landes, said that he shared François Ruffin’s analysis: “The question of the economic and social dropout of the rural working classes is a subject on which we must continue to work. »
Solid in substance, more fragile in strategy
In reality, even among the most pro-Nupes socialists or environmentalists crossed in recent weeks, all believe that the strategy deserves at least to be adapted and the project probably reworked accordingly. But at LFI, the atmosphere is quite different. “If you tell me that we need to make more votes where we haven’t done enough, I agree”, is limited to answering a pundit of the party. There is therefore no question of reviewing the strategy or getting back around the table to talk about the project. As in the presidential election for Jean-Luc Mélenchon, we are betting on flirting with abstainers.
“Changing our feet would make us lose clarity on the substance and on the strategy”, believes a rebellious MP who believes that “the history of the rural/urban division does not resist a solid analysis for a second”. So certainly, the Nupes was able to win back rural strongholds in the legislative elections and be competitive in others. Certainly also, the share of Ile-de-France MPs in the rebellious group is much smaller than in 2017. But 28% of Nupes MPs are elected in Ile-de-France, compared to 15% of left-wing MPs in 2012 and 14% in 1997.
The rebellious official quoted above then qualifies this statement, insisting on recalling that voters in rural areas are not so different from others: “our proposals to limit hunting are also very popular in these sectors”. Rural areas are more diverse than people think. Nevertheless, Nupes holds there a serious subject of internal controversy. In this new school year, it now appears that it is less likely to break soon on nuclear power, Europe, or even “benefits”, as has been widely predicted, than on the strategy to be followed to win .