Socialist representatives confirmed to 167 votes for and 101 against (and 23 abstentions) the programmatic and electoral agreement made by the party leadership with the “rebellious” on Wednesday morning. An alliance that creates within the party of heavy oppositions and tensions.
Le Monde
It was a tight vote that we had to expect but whose result will have notorious consequences on the future of the party. With 167 votes for and 101 against (and 23 abstentions), the National Socialist Party Council (PS) validated on the night of Thursday 5 to Friday May 6 the agreement concluded with rebellious France (LFI) nearly forty-eight Hours earlier, including a programmatic component and an electoral distribution for the legislative elections. The PS therefore joins LFI, Europe Ecologie-les Verts (EELV) and the French Communist Party (PCF) within the alliance of the new Ecological and Social People’s Union (Nuts) for the election of June 12 and 19.
While the National Council – a sort of PS assembly which brings together more than 300 party representatives throughout the national territorial – had started around 7:30 p.m. at the party’s headquarters in Ivry (with part of its members In videoconference), heated discussions before the vote continued until late in the evening. A revealing of the issue of this national council, that the president of the body, Luc Broussy, qualified, already upstream as” the most important, the most crucial, in the recent history of the Socialist Party “. The result of the vote was known shortly after midnight.
Fronde and very strong internal opposition of the Party Tenors
And for good reason: within the rose party, many tenors have opposed this alliance with the “rebellious” in recent days and have tried to convince internally not to adopt this agreement. Former Minister Stéphane Le Foll, the former head of government Bernard Cazeneuve, the former first secretary of PS Jean-Christophe Cambadélis, the president of the Occitanie region Carole Delga, as well as the former President of the Republic François Hollande , believe that this agreement represents a denial of their party and its values.
Their position on the European Union, secularism, international issues, pension reform are, for them, as many programmatic differences with LFI as red lines not to be crossed. As a result, Bernard Cazeneuve announced leaving the PS on Wednesday, even before the national council vote.
Another notable friction point since Wednesday, which could have turned the vote, was that of the constituencies. The PS did not, in fact, obtained only seventy investitures after negotiations with the “rebellious” on the night of Tuesday May 3 to Wednesday May 4, seeing no pink candidate presented in thirty departments, despite his Local anchoring.
An alliance defended by the party leadership
But the wish of this agreement was however real within the PS. It was carried by management, majority in internal bodies, and supported by several local elected officials having decreased in favor of the Union of the left parties, after the historic failure of the PS candidate in the first round of the presidential election -Anne Hidalgo having obtained only 1.75 % of the votes-and third place acquired by Jean-Luc Mélenchon (21.95 %).
The first secretary, Olivier Faure, in favor of this union for a long time, has thus pleaded for a rapprochement with the “rebellious”, while the tensions, the lines of friction and the attacks between the two parties were numerous during the Presidential campaign.
The PS National Council had also given its green light to the party leadership to negotiate with the “rebellious” by a vote on April 20 (160 for, 75 against and 10 abstentions), while the latter had Already started their exchanges with environmentalists and communists – with whom an agreement was concluded, respectively, Sunday and Monday.
While the outcome of the vote was still uncertain Thursday morning, Olivier Faure defended the agreement concluded with the “rebellious” on BFM-TV. Scanning the criticisms of opponents internal to this alliance, he had argued that “the real socialist party, it is a socialist party which accepted in its story of being a party which jostled, with [François] Mitterrand, with [Lionel ] Jospin, who had accepted the idea of going towards a form of radicality “.