Socialist Party votes for a “moratorium” on Nupes: to the final crisis of the left alliance?

If Nupes’ death certificate is not officially made public, the leftist alliance will indeed be in its death throes. On Tuesday evening, on the occasion of the National Council of the Socialist Party (the party’s parliament), its first secretary Olivier Faure received votes for a “moratorium on his participation in the work of Nupes”, an alliance that has united since May 2022 socialists, communists, environmentalists and rebels. Discussed? Repeated refusals by Jean-Luc Mélenchon and several LFI leaders to classify the Hamas attack as “terrorist”. “This series of mistakes has become intolerable,” Faure condemned in his speech.

Thus, after five hours of sometimes acrimonious debate, around 1 a.m., the approximately 300 members of the national council by just over 54% approved the text of the leadership, which represents a clear distancing, and two days later the PCF resolution calling for a “new type of union” , describing Nupes as a “dead end”. Olivier Faure’s internal opponents were unable to put to a vote a tougher text in which they asked the national council to “suspend” the participation of the PS in “any framework of joint collective action with the LFI.”

In his opening speech, the PS chief told the story of the crises that have rocked Nupes over the past 18 months: the Quatennens affair, diverging strategies during the pension reform debate, comments about the police after Nael’s death. “We did not sign up for permanent brothelization. We are here to govern and transform,” Faure criticized, accusing Jean-Luc Mélenchon of “conflicts at every turn.”

“Do not unite under any conditions”

If the PS did not officially execute Nupes, Mélenchon did so earlier in the morning. “Olivier Faure is smashing Nupes on personal issues that concern me,” the three-time presidential candidate said on X shortly after the socialist announced a moratorium on France Inter. A little later, the president of the LFI group in the Assembly, Matilda Pano, said she was “dismayed” and condemned the use of a “pretext” to break up the union. “It is not serious to explain by personal problems, I quote the “Mélenchon method,” their departure, apparently desired, from Nupes,” she emphasized.

In the adopted text, the socialists confirm their commitment to the alliance of the left and environmentalists. “I’m not asking for less unity, I’m asking for more unity. But not an alliance on any terms,” Fore recalled. Thus, the PS wants to “build a new working structure”, claims that “there is no irreconcilable left” and proposes to open “two clarifying projects”: the first to resolve differences, the second to restore order in the functioning of Nupes. “I believe in the need for a radical change in the image of the union,” Fore warns.

In the face of the imminent end of Nupes, at least in its original version, the environmental group in the Assembly plays an extraordinary role. On Tuesday he proposed gathering the alliance’s 151 lawmakers “as quickly as possible” to try to talk again and overcome differences. This new day of crisis, marked by the Obono controversy, also revived divisions within the LFI between the Mélenchonists and the rebels. “The general staffs are failing. Jean-Luc Mélenchon put the roast on the line and it is a mistake, criticizes LFI MP Raquel Garrido. He should benefit from our gratitude, but we also have the right to say: thank you for allowing us to become better “.