2022 French legislatives

[Sir John Johns]

Beyond the controversy over the candidacy of Bouhafs, there are some indications of discontent among left-wingers in the banlieues about the strategy followed by the NUPES and LFI to shun local activists of immigrant background and ‘parachute’ white bourgeois party bigwigs as candidates in popular constituencies they have no particular connection with. I know parachutage is a tradition in French politics but this isn’t boding well for the LFI that is pretending founding ‘a Sixth Republic’ and is clearly repeating the exact same bad practices than the parties of the ‘old’ left (PS and PCF). Probably also not the best way to encourage turnout in said banlieues.

See for example, this thread:

https://twitter.com/Aziz_Oguzz/status/1521402676692594688

In the detail, there has been the already mentioned case of the PS incumbent Lamia El Aaraje in Paris-15 who has been sidelined to the benefit of Danielle Simonnet (criticized for occupying a public housing rented at a below market-price rent) while the constituency Simonnet was a candidate in 2017 (Paris-6) has been awarded to Sophia Chikirou, Jean-Luc’s presumed girlfriend as well as a commentator on BFM-TV and the head of a communication agency currently prosecuted for overcharging during the LFI 2017 campaign. Incumbent deputy Danièle Obono, that the far-right really really hates, is however running for reelection in Paris-17.

In Seine-Saint-Denis, the fifth constituency has been awarded to Raquel Garrido, the partner of Alexis Corbière, the incumbent LFI deputy of the seventh constituency (running for reelection, obviously) and close associate of Mélenchon. A particularly unpleasant hack, Garrido once made a joke about Venezuelan anti-government demonstrators being run over by an armored vehicle to draw some asinine parallel with the French police response to the Yellow Jackets protests (totally in line with the Orwellian though widespread among both far-right and far-left according to which Western democracies are actually the worst conceivable totalitarian regimes while genuine ruthless dictatorships are a political model to be followed). She is also employed on Bolloré’s C8 television channel as a commentator in one the trash talk-shows anchored by Cyril Hanouna. The NUPES has also nominated on the LFI quota Thomas Portes (ex-PCF, ex-EELV), who is apparently living in Agen, in the Seine-Saint-Denis-3 and has ‘parachuted’ in Seine-Saint-Denis-9, Aurélie Trouvé, a former spokesperson for the anti-globalist ATTAC organization. Out of eight known LFI candidates in Seine-Saint-Denis, it seems only one (Nadège Abomangoli) is a person of color, ironically the same number than for the supposedly awfully xenophobic and racist PCF and the PS which have for their part obtained the NUPES nomination in respectively two and one constituencies.

A quick glance shows the situation sounds pretty similar in other départements of Île-de-France. In Val-de-Marne, Rachel Kéké, a leader of the French-African maids strike in a Paris hostel, has been nominated in the seventh constituency, one of the less favorable to the left in the département with not much chance of victory. Meanwhile the more winnable second and third constituencies have been attributed to Clémence Guetté (the general secretary of LFI close to Mélenchon ‘parachuted’ from Deux-Sèvres) and Louis Boyard (a 21-year-old former high school union leader and a commentator in one of Hanouna’s trash talk-shows where he confessed having sell drugs to pay his studies; they really haven’t found better???).

In Essonne, the tenth constituency, where Mélenchon received its second best result, had been attributed to Antoine Léaument, a former Modem member and now the head of Méluche’s communication team who ran in Châteauroux (Indre) in the departmental elections of last year. The constituency is covering Grigny, a very poor banlieue with large communities of Sub-Saharan African background, not really matching Léaument’s own white bourgeois origins. Meanwhile, Essonne-7 has been attributed to Claire Lejeune, the young leader of marches for climate, maybe not the best profile to defeat the incumbent LR deputy Robin Reda, running for reelection for LREM, who is building with his wife (his successor as as mayor of Juvisy-sur-Orge) an electoral stronghold on the model of what Jean-Christophe Lagarde previously did in Drancy (a similar profile at least: a very young, ambitious and opportunist right-wing candidate who wins the mayorship of a banlieue commune after decades of management by the left, get elected a deputy in the wake and give his mayor office to his own wife).

Other controversial nominations are including Gabriel Amard who is currently living with Méluche’s daugher and will run in Rhône-6 after having previously ran for deputy in Essonne (his first political basis) in 2012 and in Jura in 2017, for mayor of Villeneuve-d’Ascq (Nord) in 2019 and for a regional councilor in Isère in 2021. There has been also uproar among LGBT groups over the nomination by the NUPES of Jérôme Lambert, the incumbent PS deputy of Charente-3 (and grand-nephew of François Mitterrand), who is hence running for reelection. Lambert has voted against same-sex marriage while also expressed support for Bashar al-Assad regime and previously openly call France to recognize the annexation of Crimea by Russia, even participating in electoral observation missions in the peninsula (also in Kazakhstan with Thierry Mariani) when he found absolutely nothing to object to these rigged elections. Impersonator Gérald Dahan, famous for his prank calls, is running as a LFI candidate in Charente-Maritime-3, five years after having unsuccessfully ran in Hauts-de-Seine-10.



In my own constituency (Finistère-8), a former socialist stronghold that resisted the 1993 and 2002 ‘blue’ waves before electing a Modem candidate in 2017 (51.4% of the vote, the weakest result in the département for Macronism which won then every constituency), the NUPES has decided to nominate some 60-year-old or so LFI guy I can’t find much details on, except that he is a unionist in the postal services who ran in only a cantonal election (that he lost by large margins), wrote for Ruffin’s garbage newspaper (I go to its website to see if it was as bad as I remembered and, well, I immediately came across a book on Macron’s record in office they have edited whose cover is illustrated with a cartoon of Macron next to a ‘Sanofi’ syringe...) and signed two petitions, one in 2012 to reiterate support to the ‘no’ in the 2005 UE referendum (because their 2005 analyses ‘were right’; also a reference to the ‘masters of the world’ and participants to ‘meetings in Davos, of Bilderberg, of Trilateral Commission and of Le Siècle [French think tank]) and another one to oppose the expulsion of Gérard Filoche from the PS after he had retweeted an anti-Semitic photomontage coming from the website of Alain Soral (self-described national socialist and a denier of the Holocaust). I personally feel he is a bad fit for his constituency (this is rather a center-left and relatively moderate land even if the LCR/NPA used to achieve some local but ephemeral and limited success in the 2000s), just like apparently quite many NUPES candidates. But since the last legislative when literal unknowns were elected only because they have the LREM logo, I guess everything could happen.

[Sir John Johns]

Also, I have criticized a lot Mélenchon but, in stark contrast, while he was very active building a coalition in the aftermath of the runoff, Marine Le Pen just vanished during two weeks, preferring going into holiday. She’s not even attended the traditional 1 May march in honor of Joan of Arc, the first time no member of the Le Pen family was present in such event. The party hasn’t at the moment a clear and particularly inspiring message (beyond Macron sucks and doesn’t deserve a parliamentary majority) and its main goal now seems to utterly destroy Zemmour’s concurrent party and punish the ‘traitors’ who dared decamp to the enemy or even only contemplated doing it. Hence why the RN has announced it would field a candidate against Zemmour wherever he ran and discarded any agreement with Reconquête.

There is however some ‘interesting’ local variations: in Alpes-Maritimes-3, this is pure madness as the RN snubbed its natural candidate, Philippe Vardon (a pretty well-known figure, a candidate for mayor of Nice several times and the RN leader in the regional council) guilty of having advocated an alliance with Zemmour, to nominate instead Benoît Kandel, a deputy to the then-LR mayor of Nice Christian Estrosi (since converted to Macronism)... who had joined Zemmour’s Reconquête in last February but left just one month later and is now a member of the RN, it seems. But Vardon is still maintaining his candidacy while Reconquête has for its part nominated its own candidate, Hermine Falicon, a former collaborator of Joachim Son-Forget, the madman elected by expats in Switzerland as a LREM candidate and now a member of Reconquête. So three far-right candidacies in a constituency where the incumbent LREM deputy hasn’t been renominated but is apparently still running against the new official Macronist candidate, a member of Édouard Philippe’s Horizons. Apparently, same mess in Vaucluse-5 where the official candidates of the RN and Reconquête will face a third far-right candidate, a RN member whose substitute is the local head of Reconquête.

Anyway, Zemmour’s party is already in a bad shape, with several bigwigs having left Reconquête the last month: Antoine Diers (ex-LR), Jean Messiha (ex-RN) and Philippe de Villiers who lost his role in the party leadership after only a dozen of days. Zemmour is seeking a constituency but may ultimately not even running, having successively renounced to a hypothetical candidacy in Paris, in the expat constituency covering Israel and in Alpes-Maritimes. Samuel Lafont (in charge of Zemmour’s campaign on Internet) is now renouncing to run in Gard while Marion Maréchal has discarded a candidacy in Vaucluse to officially dedicate herself to her future child. And no news of Son-Forget since his weird trip in Ukraine in last March. At this rate, Reconquête would be lucky if it even had a single deputy in the next legislature and may be doomed to the same fate that Mégret's MNR.

[Sir John Johns]

Valls has just deleted his Twitter account. What a sore loser!

Also, Son-Forget is eliminated in the Switzerland-Liechtenstein constituency with 4.2% of the votes. He wasn't helped by the fact that his last party, Reconquête, fielded a candidate against him.

[Sir John Johns]

What's this about the Interior Ministry not allowing the name NUPES to appear on the ballot and counting all the left-wing parties' results separately instead? Does Mélenchon have an actual complaint here or did he just screw up the paperwork?

There is no paperwork, labelling is a decision sorely in the hands of the Interior Ministry and the prefectures.

https://twitter.com/Conseil_Etat/status/1534191976345653253

The NUPES must be counted as a single political nuance.

The juge des référés estimates that counting the parties of that coalition separately could violate the sincerity of the presentation of the election results.

Currently the candidates running for the NUPES are categorized by the Interior Ministry either as ‘FI’ (France Insoumise), either as ‘COM’ (Communist), either as ‘SOC’ (Socialist), either as ‘ECO’ (Ecologist) and, probably, also either as ‘DVG’ (‘divers gauche’). Meanwhile the candidates of the zillions of parties, movements, micro-parties and phone booths supporting Macron have been awarded by the ministry the ‘ENS’ (‘Ensemble!’) label with not even a distinction made between the Modem and LREM Renaissance.

As the ‘ECO’ category is also including various pro-Macron, right-wing, joke or fake ecologist or ‘ecologist’ parties as well as the Animalist Party (a single-issue party that is outside of the left/right divide), it would have been impossible to know the exact results obtained by the NUPES candidates unless going into long and tedious calculations.

As insane as it sounds EELV has apparently no right to a distinct label unlike, for example, * check notes * the Radical Party of the Left (RIP). If this isn't a proof the organization of the elections should not be entrusted to the Ministry of Interior.

[Sir John Johns]

The president of LR, Christian Jacob, has discarded any coalition agreement with Ensemble, a position certainly shared by a majority of the party’s cadres which is unwilling to see their remaining voters continuing decamping towards the RN. Anyway, an open alliance with Macron would probably led to a schism in LR.

None of the three largest parties (Renaissance, LFI and RN) have a tradition and an appetite for things like dialogue, negotiations, compromise and understanding. So, great chance to have an unruly and messy lower house, especially considering the bunch of clowns/hacks/drama queens elected under the RN (Julien Odoul) and NUPES banner (sorry but people like Sandrine Rousseau or Aymeric Caron will not help the left regaining the vote of popular classes). Also lot of influential or experimented deputies have been defeated, in particular among the leadership of the outgoing majority that have been decimated (the president of the National Assembly, Richard Ferrand; Christophe Castaner, the president of the LREM caucus; Patrick Mignola, the president of the Modem caucus; Florent Bachelier, the Renaissance first quaestor) which will not help things.

Meanwhile the upper house is controlled by LR and, constitutionally, the president has no right to dissolve the National Assembly in the year following the legislative election. The election of the next president of the assembly, the approval of the next government (uncertain if Borne will remain in office) and budget will be fun...

[Sir John Johns]

To (partly) explain how we get there, I think it is important to mention just how CATASTROPHIC the few first weeks of Macron II have been, giving the impression that Macron is, at the same time, a totally inexperienced politician who has just taken office at the head of a team of incompetents who discovered the hard way the harsh realities of governing a country AND as the head of an administration that has been in office since way too long for its own sake, being undermined by an avalanche of scandals, lacking new ideas and fresh faces, running out of steam and being totally disconnected from your average voter.

Among the various things that have happened in the latest weeks, there have been:

* all that fake drama and suspense over the new PM and the new ministers that ended with the favorite since months being appointed to Matignon against a background of total indifference (the office of prime minister having been reduced to an empty shell and Borne is a technocratic and uncharismatic figure). The only real surprise (Pap Ndiaye) has only served to drive the far-right totally crazy and has not lost time disappointing voters his appointment was supposed to please when announcing he will pursue most of the policies of Blanquer (anyway Ndiaye has zero latitude to make decision, being an outsider and having his own chief of staff directly appointed by the Élysée without him having his word in such choice).

Nobody has neither been thrilled by the appointment of another cold technocratic woman who has previously shown no interest for environment matters as environment minister (Amélie de Montchalin, whom I’m glad to have discovered I’m not the only one having problems differentiating her from Aurore Bergé; anyway, she has been defeated and will have to resign) nor by Dupond-Moretti remaining justice minister despite being indicted for conflicts of interest (an indictment just confirmed this week). The only motive advanced to explain Dupont-Moretti reappointment in the press is that he is deeply hate by magistrates which convinced Macron it would be a good idea to kept him just to piss off magistrates.

* the accusations of rape made against Damien Abad, the newly appointed minister for Solidarities and LR defector, the government has failed to convincingly tackle (see below). Now, an additional third woman (a centrist activist) is accusing him of attempted rape.

* the disastrous management of the incidents during the Champion’s League finale with the Interior Minister blaming problems on the massive use of false tickets by Liverpool supporters without being able to produce a single evidence and the subsequent revelations that the videos of the surveillance cameras have been automatically erased. Supposedly because of dysfunction in the justice proceedings. I let you decide whether it is a cover-up attempt or just plain incompetence.

Relatedly, everybody is aware since the Yellow Jackets protests that the prefect of police of Paris, Didier Lallement, is totally unable to manage any not public gathering without it turning into a complete chaos with peaceful attendants being caught between vandals and the police. It is also obvious the only tool of the police under Lallement to regulate crowds is just teargassing everybody. Yet, he is still in office.

* the prompt intervention of the Interior Minister (again) on behalf a couple that claimed in the press (Le Parisien) and later on a TV channel owned by Bolloré (in Hanouna’s show, of course) having their newly bought house squatted by a Tunisian family. Said family (with four children) also claimed having bought the house and said having been the victims of a fraud. Anyway, they were assaulted by masked far-right thugs when willingly leaving the house.

Thereafter, it was however revealed that not only the pair was totally aware of the house being squatted when they bought it (hence why they got it at a reduced price) but that both are charged for drug trafficking, illegal possession of weapons and membership of a criminal organization.

* During a radio broadcasting, few days before the first round, Élisabeth Borne was asked by a listener, a disabled woman in a wheelchair, about her disability benefit having been suspended because her husband earned too much money ($1,810 a month). Our new ‘left-wing’ PM suggested the listener that, maybe, she could get back to work, an answer that made the disabled woman cried.

* The government having to deal with a critical shortage of staff in emergency services (with just only some 120 services having to reduce or even suspend their activities...) in spite of repeated warning for years about the serious condition in public hospitals.

* Macron being asked during a visit in Tarn by a high school girl student why is he appointing in his government ‘men accused of rape’ and unable to provide a convincing answer. The day thereafter, the girl received the visit of the gendarmes in her home to question her, supposedly to have more details over a rape the girl has suffered few years ago and mentioned when discussing with the president. The gendarmerie has since apologized.

* the Macronist fat guy at the head of Hunters’ Federation (yeah I have a personal grudge against him but it is totally deserved) complaining that medias are talking too much about the ongoing heatwave and hinting it is a conspiracy to help the NUPES being elected. No matter it is currently 35 degrees Celsius in Brittany, at a time when summer hasn’t even begun, that currently 40 départements have introduced water restrictions because of drought and that farmers are very concerned about losing their harvests because of abnormally high temperatures since the beginning of the year to the point the government has bestowed them financial support last month.

* the controversy over the label of the NUPES candidates and the other one about which coalition came ahead in the first round.

* Renaissance being absolutely totally deranged in their criticisms against the NUPES, using adjectives like ‘Soviet’ or ‘anarchist’ to describe it, and denouncing the horrors that will happen in case Mélenchon become prime minister: French could no longer chopping wood (according to Castaner who will now have a lot of free time) and, a contribution of the Macronist youth movement (JAM), young people could no longer spent a three-day trip in Marrakesh. This latter was raised in a hilariously bad video posted on social networks. It was so terrible and appeared so much disconnected from the daily life of your average student/young worker/young unemployed, the JAM quickly deleted it.

https://twitter.com/Le_Trema/status/1537077295726338049

* Also, Macron’s party being totally unable to agree on a coordinated strategy for the NUPES/RN runoffs, with Renaissance waiting several hours after the publication of the first round results before giving official voting recommendations (clearly, they have not anticipated that). These have changed from one constituency to another one with not much consistency (tellingly, in Hénin-Beaumont constituency, the Macronist candidate announced she would cast a blank vote in the runoff opposing Le Pen to a Green candidate in Hénin-Beaumont).

* More anecdotally, but illustrating the possibility that, maybe, maybe, Macronism isn’t that much different from Lepénisme or Mélenchonisme and is another shade of what is called nowadays ‘populism’ (but could be more accurately labeled as ‘Caesarism’ or ‘Bonapartism’): Macronist pundit Brice Couturier has spent the last weeks claiming the incidents in Stade de France were a sabotage operation staged by Putin (angry over Saint-Petersburg having lost the organization of the Champion’s League) and ranting against the NUPES he described as ‘the party of the medias’. Granted, Couturier is a complete nutcase (former Maoist who is now obsessed by the dangers of ‘cancel culture’, ‘wokism’ and ‘Islamo-leftism’) who is doing too much Twitter but you can see some similarities in the Macronist intellectual galaxy like for example the deranged reactions of ‘prestigious’ publications like La Revue des Deux Mondes after the defeat of Manuel Valls or Jean-Michel Blanquer (‘Manuel Valls fallen for France, the left and its values’ when he was just defeated because voters rightly saw him as an opportunist and a dilettante).

[Sir John Johns]

Not sure if this is the right place to post it as the party failed to get any candidate in the runoff but here are the latest news from Reconquête:

https://twitter.com/LeGlobe_info/status/1539339739706363908

BEREZINA – The Reconquête party is in full implosion mode. During a meeting on Tuesday, Éric Zemmour has affirmed that popular classes are too much ‘illiterate’ for him addressing them… before barely avoiding going into a fist fight with Jérôme Rivière (L’Express).

The ‘illiterate’ part is confirmed by Yellow Jacket figure Jacline Mouraud who has however stated she will remain a member of Reconquête:

https://twitter.com/JaclineMouraud/status/1539616755118526464

Asked to know whether the expression ‘the popular France is illiterate’ has been pronounced by E. Zemmour, like many others, I am obliged to state the veracity of such statement. It is an insult to the people of France that I’m defending with all my strength

[Sir John Johns]

The reasoning behind this reshuffle (because yes, technically, this is a reshuffle while, traditionally, after a legislative election, the whole government resigns and a new one is constituted even if concretely one a few ministerial changes actually happen – here, this is a continuation of Borne’s 1st government) is not making much sense:

- Damien Abad is out while he is *only* investigated for an attempted rape (hence how one of the few – the only one? - recent LR deserters has lost his position in the government) but, in the meantime, Chrysoula Zacharopoulou, who is investigated for very similar facts, is remaining and so is Éric Dupont-Moretti, currently formally indicted for illegal taking of interest, quite an inconvenience when you’re the justice minister.

- Gérald Darmanin, who has exposed these latest weeks his incompetence (see the disastrous management of the Stade de France incidents), is not only confirmed as interior minister but, as previously mentioned, is also gaining the overseas. By this point, I think Macron has decided to piss off his last remaining voters in Martinique, Guadeloupe, Guyane and so on, because the minister delegate for the overseas is a former prefect (strong colonial era vibes here) while what is seemingly the only government not coming from metropolitan France, Sonia Backès, is coming from New Caledonia where the Macron administration has brilliantly managed the independence referendums process with turnout collapsing from 85.7% to 43.9% between referendum 2 and referendum 3. The portfolio gave to Backès: whatever means ‘secretary of state for Citizenship’ (under the supervision of Darmanin; really this is masterful trolling coming from Macron).

- Christophe Béchu is promoted from junior minister in charge of territorial collectivities to minister for Ecological Transition and Cohesion of Territories in spite of never having showed a particular interest for environmental questions nor having experience in that area. Macron has campaigned on having an ambitious environment policy but he has already renounced to even pretend caring about it. Béchu has also been criticized for his past vocal opposition to same-sex marriage and his controversial decision to withdraw AIDS prevention posters aimed at homosexuals when the mayor of Angers.

- the ministry for Health and Prevention, that has been downgraded to fourteenth position in the protocol order (behind the ministry for Culture, this is largely symbolic but just lol), has been awarded to François Braun, an emergency doctor considered as favorable to private practitioners. French hospitals are currently overloaded, there is shortage of nursing staff, a new wave of Covid infections is ongoing as well as a monkey pox outbreak but the government has did absolutely nothing these last weeks bar ordering a ‘flash report’ on situation in health sector to… François Braun in spite of the pile of parliamentary reports already existing on the matter.

- Olivier Véran, who barely avoided being kicked out from the government on last May and got appointed delegate minister for parliamentary relations (he certainly hasn’t been overloaded during his short stint at this post), has been moved to spokesman of the government and replaced by Franck Riester, that unnoticeable guy who has been in the government since 2018. Véran is himself replacing Olivia Grégoire, a straight talk and quite vulgar and aggressive woman (also the former girlfriend of Manuel Valls), whose position as government’s spokesperson was no longer very appropriate since the government lost its majority in the National Assembly and has no longer the luxury of creating useless controversies with abrupt and rude comments. Grégoire is, of course, remaining in the government as minister delegate for Small and Medium Businesses, Commerce, Handicraft and Tourism.

- Caroline Cayeux, the mayor of Beauvais, has been appointed to the position of minister delegate for Territorial Collectivities. She is a right-wing dinosaur who already worked in the ministerial administration at the time of Pres. Pompidou but she finally got a job of minister at 73. Like Béchu, she has been widely criticized for her past strong opposition to same sex marriage and participation in the protests organized by the homophobic lunatics of the Manif pour tous.

- Clément Beaune has been, for some reason, demoted from minister delegate for Europe to minister delegate to Transportation in spite of a relatively remarkable tenure as the man in charge of European matters since 2020.

- The position of minister delegate to City and Housing is going to Olivier Klein, the mayor of Clichy-sous-Bois in the banlieue, who has been previously a member of the PCF and the PS.

- Geneviève Darrieussecq, a close ally of Bayrou, who has served in the government since 2017 but has been totally unnoticeable, is moved from minister delegate for Veterans to minister delegate for Disabled Persons.

- the best part is the totally useless ministry (‘Social and Solidary Economy and Associative Life’) that has been recreated just to give something for Marlène Schiappa to pass the time between the writing of her books nobody is reading and her countless television appearances to laud Macron and embarrass herself. A government that needs to call back Marlène Schiappa is really a desesperate government.

- Sarah El Haïry, who has been kicked out from the government in last May, is returning as secretary of state for Youth and Universal National Service. I guess she is only here to meet political (she is a member of Modem) and gender parity quotas. Also, she distinguished herself last year by stating she was more concerned about intersectional discourses than Éric Zemmour.

- Patricia Mirallès has been appointed secretary of state in charge of Veterans and Remembrance just few weeks after revelations made by Mediapart according to which she has claimed as parliamentary expense claims a hotel stay with her husband, the house relocation of her son and the repair of her daughter’s computer hard-drive.

Unlike the last May government constitution, there isn’t even a surprise appointment like Ndiaye. Here, this is just a game of musical chairs and a shameless rewarding of incompetence and corruption that will please absolutely nobody (bar the most braindead followers of Macron and the ones appointed/kept in the government, and even the latter part is uncertain).

Also, yeah, there is 42 members in the government; so much for the eternal promises of gouvernement resserré (government with a small number of ministers).

[Sir John Johns]

Éric Coquerel (LFI), the newly elected head of the finance commission of the National Assembly, is facing since several days accusations of sexual harassment. Well, renewed accusations of sexual harassment because insistent rumors about Coquerel’s alleged inappropriate behavior with women circulated since several years now but it has been relaunched by recent declarations of Black activist and TV pundit Rokhaya Diallo (who mentioned on radio having discussed with LFI female members about Coquerel’s improper behavior with women) and the filing today of a complaint for sexual harassment against Coquerel by a former Parti de Gauche member for facts dating back from 2014. The woman who filed the complaint has been since part of the Yellow Jackets movement and is very involved in the antivax movement. On her own admission, Coquerel’s inappropriate gestures (wandering hands and insistent flirt) against her may not be considered as a criminal offense by the justice.

This is of course gold for the right and the far-right which are denouncing the hypocrisy and double standards of the NUPES, which has demanded the resignation of Abad these last weeks but is now much more cautious about the case of Coquerel.

But some women inside the NUPES are more than pissed up, notably because the allegation made by LFI deputy Manuel Bompard about the absence of reporting on Coquerel’s behavior to the LFI internal committee in charge of fighting sexual and sexist violence has been contradicted by a former LFI female member. According to this one, she has discussed the case of Coquerel with Bompard in 2018.

Everybody will be genuinely shocked to learn that Jean-Luc has decided to blame the medias (and also the far-right and longtime political enemies of the LFI that are apparently including Diallo):

https://twitter.com/JLMelenchon/status/1543642323321503746

The goal of the circus about Coquerel: his presidency of the commission of finance and the revenge of the RN. Some medias are organizing a parade of accusers who have in common their activism for years against the LFI. Consequently, I will not going tomorrow on BFM to participate in this staging.

A perfect timing for Taha Bouhafs to come back today under the limelight after two months of silence with the publication of a statement in which he claimed that, unlike the version then sold by the LFI, he has been forced to withdraw his candidacy for deputy, has never been informed on the identity of the person who is accusing him of sexual violence and is totally ignorant of the exact nature of the allegations made against him. He also said that Clémentine Autain demanded him to make a statement to explain his withdrawal because of the racist attacks he had received and not because of the allegations of sexual violence. As we all know, the accusations of sexual violence were still made public and Bouhafs is now demanding the LFI a ‘just and fair proceeding’ with the right to defend himself inside the party against the accusations made against him.

https://twitter.com/T_Bouhafs/status/1544259343096446981

Meanwhile, the own turpitude of the RN deputies (one has been the owner of a bookstore specialized in antisemitic and Holocaust denial literature and has been previously jailed for gun violence; another one is sued by an aristocratic family for usurpation of nobility as he using the name ‘Taché de La Pagerie’ very similar to the one of the family of Empress Josephine: Tascher de La Pagerie) got unnoticed and the far-right party may passed as the ‘respectable’ and ‘reasonable’ opposition.