Jean-Luc Mélenchon confides to AFP his “exasperation” to see himself “demonized” by macronie, the rights and even his partners in Nupes. He assures that he will “hold on” while wanting to “continue his withdrawal” at the start of the school year.
Last Friday of July, on the road to the Vosges where Jean-Luc Mélenchon will support an LFI activist whose house has been burned down.
The former presidential candidate, accustomed to and even fond of political contests, does not hide a deep vexation. The anger, which ignites his meeting speeches, is here cold, ripened, chewed over.
This “assassination attempt”, one of the reasons for the judicial investigation opened by the Epinal prosecution, is the straw that broke the camel’s back after a complicated year for Mr. Mélenchon, between the Quatennens case, rebellion of rebellious figures and endless tensions within the left-wing Nupes coalition.
For him, it is the culmination of an “ambience of trivialization of violence”. Rebellious elected officials receive “countless” threats, the latest this week targeting MP Thomas Portes.
“Right now it’s full pot”, “all our friends are in exasperation”, sighs Jean-Luc Mélenchon who dates the start of this period of riots – the “urban revolts” in his mouth -, during which he was accused of failing to call for calm.
Denying conveying any violence in his behavior and methods, he justified himself to his troops on Friday: “Believe in the virtue of controversy, of excessive language. Because physical violence must be replaced by the violence of speech” which is only “crossing the sword of ideas”.
Conversely, the presidential majority is, according to him, guilty of “creating an atmosphere which puts a target” behind our backs: “all those whom it designates for vindictiveness are then attacked by the fachosphere”. In addition, the macronists “take our words, speak of the republican arc. None of this is a discussion. It’s a pitched battle”, observes Jean-Luc Mélenchon.
On both sides of the trench, “everyone against us”, with the objective of obtaining, he assures, a “republican front of the Ariège type”, where LFI lost a partial legislative election against to a dissident socialist candidate supported by the presidential camp. In short “the demonization of the rebellious”.
And the one who has three presidential elections on the clock to blow: “The struggle today has an implacable side, it’s endless”.
Finishing the corner, the internal quarrels with the PS, EELV and the PCF increase as the European elections of 2024 approach – and with them the potential for a rebalancing of the balance of power in favor of these allies.
The former socialist affirms that he does not “ask too many questions about the left” … before delivering what for him is the crux of the problem: not egos but “a strategic divergence”.
He wants to convince the abstentionists while the socialists, communists and ecologists, advances Mr. Mélenchon, “believe in the existence of the center-left, an illusion. The middle classes should be ascending, but they are regressing, panic is gaining” .
In the Europeans, “if we are in the lead in front of everyone, we open a sequence until 2027 by being leaders, that changes everything”, he says. The polls give for some a Nupes list, improbable after the designation of environmental and communist leaders, neck and neck with Renaissance and the RN.
Despite the gloomy picture he has just drawn for rebellious prospects, Jean-Luc Mélenchon puffs out his chest: “There are phases where you have to hold on”, especially on the police and the union of the left, because at long term “thousands of people see who held on”.
The crest line with another promise is difficult to keep, leaving room for the presidential election of 2027. Back to school? “I will try to continue my withdrawal. It has not been easy” this year, he smiles, faced with the accumulation of crises that have shaken the country, the left and the rebellious.
29/07/2023 14:00:16 – Rochesson (France) (AFP) – © 2023 AFP