The strategy for the European elections of the Génération·s movement, founded by Benoît Hamon, is not unanimous. Thursday February 22, the two coordinators of the movement, Arash Saeidi and Léa Filoche, announced a vote by activists in favor of an alliance with La France insoumise (LFI). The executive board decided to suspend the coordinators, thus dividing the movement.
The coordinators sent a press release in the evening affirming that the activists had endorsed the choice of an alliance with the LFI list, led by Manon Aubry.
They specified that this option had received 59% of the votes, compared to 17.5% for an alliance with the list of Ecologists, led by Marie Toussaint; 16% voted not to participate in these elections, and 7.5% abstained.
LFI, which always pleads for a rally in the European elections with the other forces of the New Ecological and Social Popular Union (Nupes), as during the 2022 legislative elections, immediately welcomed this decision. “Thank you to Génération·s for engaging with us. Together, we create the only dynamic of unity against Macron/Bardella,” Ms. Aubry wrote on X.
“Regrettable heartbreaks”
But later in the night, a press release from the executive office of Génération s announced that the two coordinators, “suspended from their functions”, had “taken responsibility for communicating in their own name with the party’s means” and that “none of the communications of this February 22 commit[s] Génération·s”. “An official communication will come in the coming days,” added the executive office.
“The division of the left produces, in all families, regrettable heartbreaks,” lamented on X Benjamin Lucas, one of the four Génération·s deputies, who sit in the Ecologist group. “May these heartbreaks not be irremediable given the period and the responsibilities it implies for those we want to represent,” he added.
Génération·s was founded in 2017 by the former socialist Benoît Hamon, but the latter left political life in September 2021 to take the helm of the NGO Singa. The movement was the first to sign with LFI for Nupes in the 2022 legislative elections.
