The presidential candidate pays the slow deliquescence of a socialist party that is only the shadow of himself, with 22,000 members at the moment.
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Analysis. Anne Hidalgo is not fully responsible for his counter-performance in the surveys for the presidential election, who put it below the 5% required for the reimbursement of campaign fees. The Mayor of Paris pays the slow deliquescence of the Socialist Party (PS). Fifty years after Epinay’s Congress, in 1971, the PS is only the shadow of itself. The currents that have structured the confrontations of ideas have become fictitious or have disappeared.
In this dead star, we no longer debate, even to designate a candidate for the Elysee. The personalities who have marked his story fainted: finished, the time of the Jospin, Fabius, Jox, Mermaz, Rocard, Chevé or Holland. In the era of “elephants” succeeded the “elephants”, which do not impress anymore. The PS, which has grown from 1971 to 1989, lived, from the Rennes Congress of 1990, where it was torn on François Mitterrand’s succession, a long series of storms and shipwrecks. His agony does not end.
A “revolutionary” party
At the Epinay Congress, François Mitterrand passed his OPA on the PS, a party that wants “revolutionary” and intends to “transform capitalist society into a collectivist company”. “It is not a question of setting up a system, but to substitute it another”, proclaims the declaration of principles. Mitterrand is softened on the quest for a common government program with the French Communist Party (PCF). It is signed in June 1972. “Our fundamental objective, explains the first secretary of the PS, it is to redo a great socialist party on the ground occupied by the PCF itself, in order to demonstrate only on the 5 Million communist voters 3 million can vote socialist. “Mitterrand wins his bet and, the legislative of 1978, the PS, with 22.8%, delighted, at the price of a break with him, the first place at the PCF (20 , 6%), which then initiates its decline.
In 1974, during the Assises of Socialism, the “second left”, scope by Michel Rocard and the CFDT, joined the PS. Two great currents, which are also presidential stables, will compete: the Mitternders, citists, and the rocardians, decentralizers. At Metz Congress, in 1979, Mitterrand imposes its radical line of “rupture with capitalism”. In 1981, he entered the Elysee. In 1982, the PS has 213,584 members, against 80,300 in 1971. But the flamboyant reforms of the beginning of the septennat are interrupted by the turning point of the rigor.
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