Communists, ecologists and socialists have in turn distanced themselves from Jean-Luc Mélenchon. His positions and his personality could explain the crisis of the left.
This is the final crisis! The partners may take tweezers, mention a “moratorium” for the PS, talk about “suspension”call for the convening of a “assembly of deputies” On the environmentalist side, no one is fooled. It’s like in a divorce, when both parties tell the children that they are going to take some time to think, it is so as not to cause them pain. In this case to left-wing voters. But it’s definitely over.
By stubbornly refusing to qualify the Islamist movement of Hamas as “terrorist”, Jean-Luc Mélenchon got the skin of the rally he had built in May 2022. To consider a rethinking, one would have to imagine that he would make a real mea culpa , which is neither its style nor its intention. For months, on pensions, riots and now the Middle East, the rebellious leader wanted “conflict everything”. It succeeded. He even conflicted the left and exploded the Nupes. But this is not necessarily bad news for the left.
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The division on the left could come from a leadership crisis
Divided, it is condemned to defeat and it will continue to display its divisions until the Europeans in June since it goes into battle in dispersed order. But enslaved to the control of Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the left is also condemned to defeat. Her excesses, her brutality, her radicalism drive her into the wall. If it frees itself from the leader of the Rebels, it can perhaps come together around a more peaceful, more unifying strategy. This is the bet of the First Secretary of the PS, Olivier Faure. He rejects the idea of “two irreconcilable lefts” theorized in his time by Manuel Valls and points “a functioning problem”that is to say linked to the behavior of Jean-Luc Mélenchon.
The crisis of the left may not be due to insurmountable divisions but to a crisis of leadership. In their time, François Mitterrand then Lionel Jospin brought together the left and led it to power while respecting its diversity. In 1981, the Berlin Wall stood and moderates sat in the same government as communists. Sixteen years later, we found both Dominique Strauss-Kahn and Jean-Claude Gayssot there. In short, the leadership crisis that got the better of Nupes is a new illustration of the famous Chinese proverb, cited by Mao in the Little Red Book: “The fish always rots from the head”.