Manuel Bompard, MEP for La France insoumise, ex-campaign director of Jean-Luc Mélenchon, was the guest of 8:30 a.m. franceinfo, Wednesday April 13. He answered questions from Marc Fauvelle and Sahlia Brakhlia.
The Marine Le Pen vote is “a mistake”
“We consider that voting for Marine Le Pen cannot be an option for a voter of Jean-Luc Mélenchon”, said Manuel Bompard, who led the latter’s campaign. The now ex-LFI presidential candidate “said it in an extremely firm way”on the evening of the first round, he recalled.
“If some are tempted, since obviously some are hesitant, I tell them ‘I understand you, I respect you’added the MEP. I understand that you are angry with Emmanuel Macron, I am myself. I understand that the program carried by Emmanuel Macron worries you, it worries me myself, but don’t make this mistake.” For Manuel Bompard, the Marine Le Pen vote “adds to the social brutality and the bad economic program a religious stigma, a racial stigma.”
Fabien Roussel cannot “exempt himself from all responsibility”
“Of course there is abstention, people who we have not managed to convince of the importance of traveling to vote, but Fabien Roussel cannot exonerate himself from all responsibility either” in the defeat of Jean-Luc Mélenchon in the first round of the presidential election, said Manuel Bompard. In Humanitythe ex-communist candidate indeed denies having contributed to the failure of his left-wing competitor, to whom he missed 420,000 votes to qualify for the second round.
Legislative: LFI wants a “regrouping around the program carried by Jean-Luc Mélenchon”
After the failure of the first round of the presidential election, La France Insoumise is now turning to the legislative battle. The objective of the party explains Manuel Bompard is “to have a maximum of deputies, if possible to be in the majority, in order to be able to apply the program that we brought to the presidential election and change people’s lives”.
MEP LFI calls for a “regrouping around the program which was carried by Jean-Luc Mélenchon”. There is no question of slipping away in too many constituencies, for the benefit of other parties. He thus imagines that each in this “grouping” is assigned a number of constituencies proportional to the score of its candidate, in the first round of the presidential election. “It’s not me who decided that they make less than 5%, it’s the voters”, he defended himself.