To (lengthily) elaborated on what Zinneke has written, the NUPES alliance is going through very turbulent times since several weeks now, having to deal with LFI-related controversies on a regular basis and with the presidential ambitions of Mélenchon for 2027 because, unlike what he is publicly pretending, he is intending to run again for president and has an interest into letting the LFI and the NUPES slipping into chaos in order to impose himself as the only unifying person.
* Firstly, by now, it seems more and more likely that, contrary to the wishes of the LFI, there will be no NUPES unity list in the 2024 European elections.
Back in late August, Mélenchon came back with the very weird idea of supporting a NUPES list headed by...
Ségolène Royal. Now widely seen as an opportunist has-been, Tatie Ségolène is no longer holding a political mandate after her job as an ambassador for the Arctic and Antarctic Poles under Macron hasn’t been renewed and as her attempt to get elected in 2021 a senator for French expats at the helm of a PS dissident list spectacularly failed. Yet, she self-proclaimed the head of a NUPES list for the 2024 European elections and received the support of Mélenchon for some unclear and probably very bad reasons (clearly not to increase the NUPES’ electoral chances because Ségolène isn’t a very popular figure on the left).
Anyway, Ségolène has pissed so much people that the offer was immediately rejected by the PS, EELV and the PCF and
even the LFI (where many people inside were unhappy with the choice of Ségolène as top candidate). The latter, a week after the announcement of the candidacy of Royal, clarified it would not ultimately not support her, hence putting an end to that farce. Royal has anyway find a new job in the meantime, being now a panelist in Cyril Hanouna’s utter trash talk show on one of the TV stations of Bolloré.
The PS, EELV and the PCF are now all inclined to run each their own separate list in the European elections, especially because the main reason advanced by the LFI to constitute a joint list is very ludicrous: becoming the most-voted list, a totally useless reward in European elections (because anyway components of the NUPES will seat in different parliamentary groups), even more as polls are predicting the left as a whole would win more seats by running different lists (providing however the four lists cross the threshold) than by running a single list.
* Last month, Sophia Chikirou, a LFI deputy from Paris as well as a communication advisor (and strongly rumored to be the girlfriend of Mélenchon),
totally pissed off the PCF by posting on Facebook a text in which she wrote ‘there is some Doriot in Roussel’, hence comparing the current PCF national secretary to
Jacques Doriot, a PCF deputy and mayor of Saint-Denis in the 1930s who was excluded from the party in 1934 as part of the Stalinist purges and came to head a Mussolini-financed fascist party before turning into a fervent collaborator during the Nazi occupation, going as far as fighting on the Soviet front wearing the Wehrmacht uniform (and actually, Doriot is hardly an isolated case as there is no less than three former PCF general-secretaries –
Louis Sellier,
Henri Barbé,
Pierre Celor – who ended up embracing fascism and/or collaboration after their exclusion from the party).
The PCF has denounced Chikirou’s text as a ‘call for hate’ and demanded excuses it is still waiting for.
* Anyway, last week, Chikirou again got publicity as the French France 2 public television channel aired a report about
her dubious practices when the president of
Le Média, a left-wing web television closely aligned on LFI. France 2 notably revealed the toxic management of Chikirou who had disrespected labor laws and displayed a great lack of consideration for her employees,
calling them ‘dirty rats [she] will crush’ and making a joke about an employee sent to the hospital after having had a discomfort.
Such practices are sadly widespread among anti-capitalist and left-wing medias which are ironically absolutely no better than the mainstream medias when it comes to workers’ rights as demonstrated by recent revelations about
the union-busting practices in the tankie
Le Monde diplomatique newspaper or about the
abusive labor practices in the
Blast web television (founded by a former editor-in-chief of
Le Média, fired from that outlet precisely because of his toxic management) as well by
the sentencing last year of the founder of the
Là-bas si j’y suis left-wing news website (for which François Ruffin had previously worked when it was on a public radio station) for moral harassment after the website's staff had went on strike.
But the most widely publicized part of the report was when Chikirou sent a homophobic message after journalists from
Le Média had demanded a public apology for the diffusion of fake news. Well, yes, because there is also that:
Le Média has been criticized for his outrageously pro-Assad coverage of the Syrian Civil War, refusing to diffuse a video showing the bombing of the rebels by the Syrian Army because it would be ‘sensationalist’ while at same time diffusing the testimony of a student about the French police having sent another student into a coma, a testimony which quickly turned as totally false. It also invited various conspiracy theorists, including one who claimed that the Islamic State has been created by Israel.
Anyway, the LFI bigwigs were quite a bit embarrassed by the homophobic slur of Chikirou with Mathilde Panot explained that, while the slur is indeed homophobic, Chikirou is absolutely not a homophobic person. Several LFI deputies attempted to present the France 2 report as a sexist and classist attack against Chikirou, notwithstanding the fact that the same Chikirou has been one of the strongest supporter of Quatennens (the one who slapped his wife remember) and even advised his communication. For her part, Danielle Simonnet, a LFI deputy from Paris no longer in good terms with Mélenchon, has demanded explanations to Chikirou she is still waiting for.
To end with Chikirou, an obvious fraud (she used to be part of that utter joke that was ‘left-wing Sarkozyism’), she is also facing investigations over irregular financial practices and suspicions of over-invoicing during the Mélenchon 2017 campaign and may be indicted for ‘serious fraud’ in the next weeks, another thorn in the side of the LFI.
* Last week, to show you how much his anti-imperialism is bogus, Mélenchon
went to a long trip to Morocco during which he had a private meeting with Fouad Ali El Himma, a very close adviser to King Muhammad VI who had previously served as an interior minister and is the founder of the Makhzen’s sponsored corrupt and non-ideological Authenticity and Modernity Party. During the trip, Mélenchon also
pissed up the Polisario and its supporters with declarations considered as favorable to Rabat, saying notably that LFI has only relationships with 'parties of the Moroccan democracy' and that 'loving Morocco is maintaining the continuity of the Green March' (apparently, there are stateless Arabs not worth defending the cause). Mélenchon also praised the Moroccan government, even posting a
tweet to denounce the poverty among French students, contrasting it with the situation in Morocco, where ‘students aren’t hungry’.
* The icing on the cake has obviously been the abject response of Mélenchon and the LFI to the ongoing situation in Israel.
In
the first statement it issued, the LFI is describing the terrorist attacks as ‘the armed offensive of Palestinian forces led by the Hamas’, hinting it is considering the Islamist group as a legit military force. It also blamed the sole ‘context of intensification of the Israeli policy of occupation in Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem’ for the outbreak of violence while ‘regretting the Israeli and Palestinian deaths’. At the time of the publication of the message, no Palestinian death had been reported.
In spite of criticisms, the LFI leadership, in first place Bompard and Panot, has carefully avoided to label the Hamas attacks as acts of terrorism, preferring
describing them as ‘war crimes’.
Mélenchon’s attitude has been absolutely disgusting
accusing the Representative Council of French Jewish Institutions (CRIF) of aligning French politicians on the positions of the Israeli government and preventing the solidarity of the French people with the wish for peace and demand for an immediate cease-fire (this was the same CRIF that Mélenchon blamed for the defeat of Corbyn in 2019 by the way),
attacking his PS and EELV allies lumped together with Macron and the RN for allegedly having displayed ‘a unilateral support to the Israeli far-right government' and
calling ‘disgraceful’ the reaction of Anne Hidalgo because she expressed her total support for the Israeli people, a move Mélenchon is labeling as a ‘clientelist declaration’ while also accusing the mayor of Paris to prefer ‘the war to LFI rather than the fight for peace’. The worse (and the most revealing one) tweet may be however
the one where he is accusing the prime minister, Élisabeth Borne (whose father, remember, was a Polish Jew), of supporting ‘a foreign point of view’ and pretending she is exploiting the war in Israel to led her own war against LFI (the prime minister criticizing LFI is the same that Hamas murdering thousands of civilians, you see).
At this point, Mélenchon is just indefensible. This is a reuse of the old ‘Jewish warmonger’ antisemitic trope and, as Mélenchon had himself mentioned the figure of
Marcel Déat in
an article on last July to criticize the Danish Social Democrats, I want to remember the 'Jewish warmonger' accusation has been used by a whole segment of the 1930s French left – the one defending pacifist views like the aforementioned Déat (SFIO deputy who was expelled from the party for his planist and authoritarian views),
Paul Faure (the general-secretary of the SFIO from 1920 to 1940),
René Belin (secretary of the CGT union between 1933 and 1940),
Charles Spinasse (economy minister in the Popular Front government) or
Ludovic Zoretti (head of the CGT education federation) – to disqualify Léon Blum’s willingness to intervene in the Spanish Civil War on the Republican side or to oppose the appeasement policy with Hitler’s Germany by using his Jewish origins which supposedly explained Blum’s alleged bellicosity and strong hostility towards the Nazi regime. Blum who, of course, already faced very nasty antisemitic attacks from the right-wing politicians and newspapers.
Déat, Faure, Belin, Spinasse and Zoretti like many left-wing and not left-wing pacifists logically ended up collaborating with the Nazis during the occupation: Belin served as a labor minister in the Vichy regime; Spinasse made on 10 July 1940 a powerful discourse calling for an authoritarian regime and supporting awarding the full powers to Pétain; Faure led most of his supporters in parliament to vote in favor of the end of the Third Republic and the full powers to Pétain (while the Blum-led SFIO faction overwhelmingly voted against); Déat wrote the infamous ‘
Why Die for Danzig?’ article in May 1939 before founding an über-collabo party and becoming in 1944 a member of the Sigmaringen puppet French government-in-exile; Zoretti joined Déat’s party and wrote in 1940 a pamphlet denouncing the control of the ‘bellicose Jewry’ over the SFIO. If you can read French, this
article ('Pacifism as a vector of antisemitism on the left in the 1930s') is particularly interesting and, sadly, still strongly resonates today.
Anyway, the indulgence displayed by LFI towards the Hamas has led even some of the most ardent supporters of the NUPES alliance in the PS,
like Jérôme Guedj, to publicly question what Guedj is calling ‘the strategic line of the LFI of conflictualization of the society’ as well as the continuation of the alliance with LFI. Ruffin
also publicly criticized the stance of LFI on the Hamas terrorist attacks, stating that the answer of the left-wing populist movement ‘isn’t in line with the importance of the events’ and labeled the Islamist group ‘a fanatic and terrorist organization’.
* All of this have political consequences. This is where Mélenchon is leading the left:
https://twitter.com/franceinfo/status/1711767316306768143LFI considered as more dangerous for democracy than the RN, according to a poll.
Indeed, according to that Ipsos poll made before the Hamas terrorist attacks, 57% of the surveyed are saying that LFI is dangerous for democracy against 52% for the RN. 60% agree that LFI is a party ‘which is fueling violence’ against 52% for the RN. Finally, 44% are thinking the RN is ready to govern the country against only 28% for the LFI.
Mélenchon is paving the way for a victory of the RN in 2027 by making the main left-wing party more toxic than the far-right and is helping to the normalization of the RN by making Le Pen’s party looking like more constructive and serious and less extremist than LFI. The contrast between the LFI’s holier-than-thou discourse and the reality of its disgusting practices, leading to the (totally accurate in my view) assumption they are a bunch of massive hypocrites, as well as its absence of a half-realist economic platform also aren’t helping.
