It’s not a heat wave, but it’s so hot in the capital, this June 13, 2021, that the guests have dropped their ties and rolled up their shirt sleeves. A socialist assembly took place around the large table in a room adjoining the office of Anne Hidalgo, at the town hall of Paris. It is she who presides, with her Parisian musketeers: Senator David Assouline, her advisers Jean-Marie Vernat and Sylvain Lemoine, and her husband Jean-Marc Germain. The guest of the day is called Olivier Faure. The first secretary came with his lieutenants Sébastien Vincini, Pierre Jouvet, Carlos Da Silva and Christophe Clergeau. Those with whom he has run the old pink house, at least what remains of it, since 2018. The lunch, supposed to spin the last details of the presidential campaign, turns into a fiasco. The Parisian mayor suspects the party leader of playing against her, of looking for a plan B, of preferring Yannick Jadot. “If I can’t be sure that you will support me wholeheartedly, know that I won’t forget it at the next convention. No one here will forget it.” The rest is known: a crash of 1.7% in the presidential election ten months later, the agreement of the New Popular Ecologist and Social Union then to save the socialist furniture…
The threat of Anne Hidalgo has never died out. It became reality, a little before the summer of 2022. In the corridors of the town hall of Paris, it instructed its project manager, David Assouline, to mount an operation to weaken Olivier Faure, even defeat him at the congress which must to be held on January 12 and 19, 2023. The operation quickly found a name: “Refoundations”. The negotiations of Nupes, which ended then, left traces. How many dissatisfied, invested socialist candidates who are asked to give up their nomination to make way for an environmentalist or – worse – a rebellious. Faure is criticized not only for submitting to Jean-Luc Mélenchon, but above all for not having fought to defend the constituencies where the socialists have their reflexes, in Brittany, Normandy or in Carole Delga’s Occitania, a assumed competitor of Faure who watches the presidential election of 2027 with relish. “We were betrayed and he manipulated us,” says Lamia El Aaraje, one of the major burn victims of the Nupes agreement. All these disappointed is enough to form a list, a “motion” as they say in the PS, to seek the leadership of the party.
It is Nicolas Mayer-Rossignol, the mayor of Rouen, capital of the powerful federation of Seine-Maritime, abandoned in the Nupes agreement, who will lead the revolt. He is a Norman, a real one. Nupes? He is neither against nor for. He dreams of a “third voice”, which is neither a submission to Jean-Luc Mélenchon nor a return to social democracy version François Hollande. He wants to put the Nupes agreement back flat, conchie Mélenchon, prefers a François Ruffin or a Fabien Roussel, and the ecologists. “There is no question of leaving Nupes, but this team, as it is, behind LFI, does not suit us. We must discuss a common program, a new course of action which allows “to be in the second round”, justifies Lamia El-Aaraje, number two of Refondations, which includes in its ranks the mayor of Montpellier Michaël Delafosse and the deputy and vice-president of the National Assembly Valérie Rabault. Regional President Carole Delga gave them timid support, she who does not want to lose too much feathers in this congress by supporting a bad horse.
Mayer-Rossignol is not the only one who wants the skin of Olivier Faure. Hélène Geoffroy has been trying for a few years now, in vain. “If Mayer-Rossignol is the nominee of Hidalgo, Geoffroy is that of Holland”, grinds Olivier Faure. Around the socialist mayor of Vaulx-en-Velin, we find a crowd of veterans of Hollandism, starting with the former First Secretary Jean-Christophe Cambadélis or Stéphane Le Foll. Geoffroy, unlike Mayer-Rossignol, does not dither on the future of the PS within Nupes. She, first secretary? She would leave the agreement signed last spring. “What Faure has done in five years is neither more nor less than the erasure of a large party, submission to Mélenchon and the radicalized. We must find a social-democratic and ecological path”, pleads the city councilor who has already promised to support his competitor Mayer-Rossignol in the event of a duel with Faure. That’s good: a few weeks ago, during a meeting of socialist activists from a Parisian section, Anne Hidalgo said not very differently: “no matter who comes in second position, we must do everything to make Faure bend .”
An anti-Faure front has opened up at the PS. The interested party knows it and does not revel in it. “The engine of my opponents is the desire to kill me,” said the First Secretary. If his re-election seems assured, unless surprised, his seat at the head of the PS risks being more than shaky if he has to deal with one of the two competing motions. The future of Nupes, and therefore of the PS, would almost depend on it. “The game is happening here, in this left bloc, in Nupes. Building other adventures, outside the union, without LFI, can’t work. I don’t believe that Ruffin, Jadot or Roussel wish to foment a blow with Cazeneuve and others”, hammers the entourage of Faure. And the First Secretary to prophesy: ”The left, and especially the PS, has no other possible way of passage for 2027 than the rally. We can have differences of views, but we must stop breaking the legs of the neighbour, even if his name is Mélenchon”.
Even if he wins, Faure will have to reach out to his rivals and the disappointed Nupes. The mission proves to be difficult if not impossible because this congress of the PS will have been the most violent, “the most vulgar”, castigates a party executive. A congress where all shots are allowed, even the worst. In Essonne, Wednesday evening during a meeting of the federation, we shouted loud and clear that “Faure is Putin’s representative in the PS”. Hélène Geoffroy, she would have, murmur bad tongues, a “hidden deal” with Emmanuel Macron to destroy the PS from the inside and join the government. Mayer-Rossignol would be a bogeyman with his collaborators. If the PS has lost its luster from election to election in recent years, it has not forgotten its propensity for attacks below the belt. Will he survive on his own?
