A storm has passed. It didn’t last long – barely half an hour – but did a lot of damage… The scene takes place close to the Palais des Congrès in Châteauneuf-sur-Isère (Drôme). Under the palm trees, Ségolène Royal, invited to the summer universities of La France insoumise, displays a broad smile. She is finally preparing to implement a “coup” that she has been preparing for a long time, and which Le Point recently echoed. “We’re going to make a list [to the Europeans]. A list of union”, she slips, declaring herself “of course” available to drive it “with LFI”.

The announcement takes everyone by surprise: the crowd of journalists who surround him and most of the Nupes executives, who have not been informed of the initiative of the former presidential candidate. The elected LFIs crossed around the Palace do not believe it. “We never said we supported Ségolène Royal, let alone that we would side with her at the Europeans. I don’t understand. “, is surprised an elected official. Éric Coquerel, LFI deputy and longtime friend of Jean-Luc Mélenchon, believes in an “April Fool’s Day”.

Ségolène Royal, who came accompanied by a crowd of activists won over to her cause – “it’s my campaign team”, she laughs -, does double duty. While it was believed that she would no longer be involved in politics after her bitter defeat in the 2012 legislative elections, she made a comeback with a bang, stealing the show from her rebellious hosts, who nevertheless allowed her to carry out her “coup” in organizing this press briefing. Everyone now talks about “Ségo” in Valence and the rumor immediately spreads to other universities on the left, which take place at the same time in Blois (PS), Le Havre (EELV) and Strasbourg (PCF). Then, by choosing to make this announcement at the height of the political return, in the midst of the “Amfis” of the Insoumis and while the left has been torn apart for months on the advisability of a common list in the 2024 ballot, Royal hopes to (re ) place in the center of the game.

“She dreams of resorting to the becalmed ship”, summarizes a PS deputy, who assures that she has not come out of the woods without obtaining assurances of support, or at least tacit approval, from the management of LFI. A few hours before the “coup”, she had lunch with the national coordinator of the movement, Manuel Bompard, and the president of the LFI group in the Assembly, Mathilde Panot, before talking with Jean-Luc Mélenchon. The next day, the former Insoumis presidential candidate, guest of 13 hours of TF1, “approved the initiative” of Ségolène Royal, praising her “audacity” and her “courage” without however giving her a blank check for lead a list to the Europeans. At the end of an hour and a half lecture on “the method of the Popular Union”, he had dropped this cryptic sentence: “Either there will be a list of union, or there will be a list of unitaries . Meditate. »

“It’s a way for Mélenchon to put us under pressure again, deciphers a socialist deputy. It’s a win-win for Royal and him. She tries her luck elsewhere while the PS, where she has just taken back her card, does not want to designate her as head of the list and Mélenchon has the opportunity to prove that he is ready to line up behind a candidate who does not come from his camp for the Europeans. Except that no one seems to believe it. “If the alliance of ecology and the left was up to one person, it would have already been done, friends,” reacted Sandrine Rousseau on X (formerly Twitter).

And while elected LFI Raquel Garrido was enthusiastic on the same social network about Royal’s initiative, believing that the former minister “could be the missing piece that unblocks the situation, her colleague from Nupes Aymeric Caron soberly replied, “No. “Her statements are hers alone,” finally reacted curtly the president of the socialist deputies, Boris Vallaud, to AFP.

Others disqualify Ségolène Royal by recalling her positions on the war in Ukraine – “it was the West who first attacked Russia” – or on the Covid. “Let’s be in solidarity with these undisputed and responsible specialists”, she assured, for example, about Doctor Raoult.

Anyway, that’s probably what we will remember from this edition of “Amfis”. While this is undoubtedly the most elaborate political back-to-school season – at LFI headquarters, 5 employees work almost all year round to organize the event -, that there will have been more than a hundred conferences and as many Stakeholders, it is the name of Royal that emerges from almost all of our conversations with Insoumis militants and sympathizers. “Mélenchon probably doesn’t care if we only remember that. His obsession is union with the Europeans and, hating to lose, he will play all his cards. Royal is one,” decrypts a Green MP.

In fact, the co-president of the Institut la Boétie has tried everything. He has struggled for months to convince his partners of the need for union, with supporting polls. Manuel Bompard even assured that LFI would be ready to line up behind the list of the head of the designated list of environmentalists, Marie Toussaint. In vain. “What do you want”, exclaimed Mélenchon during his long conference, still mocking, in passing, the first secretary of the PS, Olivier Faure, whom he regularly – and publicly – chapters on X ( ex-Twitter). “He says to us, ‘This is unnecessarily straining your union campaign.’ It’s tense because you want to be tense and unnecessarily don’t know! »

Perhaps it was also a smokescreen to make people forget the visit to the “Amfis” of the sulphurous rapper Médine, who in early August described the essayist Rachel Khan, whose grandfather survived the Holocaust, as “ResKHANpée” and called, in one of these titles, to “crucify the laity as at Golgotha”. By resolutely defending him – “he’s our friend”, he repeats – and inviting him to debate with Mathilde Panot on Saturday August 26, Jean-Luc Mélenchon could not ignore that this would make people react.

While the environmental executives have disavowed him, while maintaining his invitation, while the PS and the PCF have refused to invite him, Mélenchon is the only one who invests so much in the defense of the rapper, whom he qualifies without hesitation of “victim”. This controversy is only an “amuse-gueule” of the summer, he wrote in a recent blog post, chiding environmentalists who would have sinned by acknowledging that inviting Medina to Le Havre was a mistake: “EELV is burned on all sides, like amateurs begging for good media points. Mélenchon obviously has nothing to reproach Medina for. In the official brochure of the “Amfis” 2023, he praises him, even presenting him – without laughing – as a “tireless narrator”, who “handles the language of Molière like no one else. “The left has not finished tearing itself apart…