April 27, 2022. The negotiations for an agreement for the legislative elections start at the headquarters of France insoumise. The stakes are high. After achieving the worst score in its history in the first round, the Socialist Party is playing its survival in the Assembly. Pierre Jouvet, spokesperson for the PS since 2008 and future linchpin of this agreement, sees only positive after the first hours of negotiations. In front of the press, he declares: “We had a constructive discussion which allowed us to move forward on a number of points allowing us to see and consider that there were no insurmountable sticking points between us.”
At 35, Pierre Jouvet embodies the new generation of the Socialist Party. He takes his card from the PS after the shock, he says, of Jean-Marie Le Pen in the second round of the 2002 presidential election. From one marathon to another, the mayor of Saint-Vallier, 4,000 inhabitants, has is one of the 70 socialist candidates invested in favor of this agreement, but he failed for the second time to win the fourth constituency of the Drôme. Unknown to the general public until then, the media talks with the rebels brought him from shadow to light. He claims not to have had “difficulties because it is a very mainstream media exposure”though it was obviously much larger than He was used to. “I was in such a bubble. We were so locked up that I had messages coming to me from outside people: we see you everywhere, we hear everywhere, etc., from people who were around me, my friends, my relatives, who weren’t used to it at all. But I wasn’t focused on it at all”, explains Pierre Jouvet.
Over the duration of these negotiations, he admits having difficulty sometimes “to sometimes pull up the thread”. But according to his diary, “in reality, they lasted more than ten days between the first time we went to the headquarters of insubordinate France and where we had the first discussion and the conclusion phase. The pace was sustained during these ten days and short nights. Pierre Jouvet says he prepared for it like a marathon runner, who is used to running in his spare time.
“I didn’t know where it was going to lead us, but I had been preparing for this exercise in preparation for the negotiations and discussions for the legislative elections for many months. Like a top athlete.”
Pierre Jouvet
at franceinfo
La France insoumise proposed to the Socialist Party about thirty constituencies. The PS negotiators managed to snatch 70. They had to be convinced in particular “in demonstrating for several days, it was somewhere the longest phase of our discussions that the negotiating framework he wanted to establish at the start was not the right one. When one discusses at the beginning the distribution of the constituencies, France insubordinate discusses as they did with the Greens and with the Communists compared to the results of the presidential election. Except that we could not take for the Socialists the score of the presidential election. Already because the score of the presidential election was very bad and therefore inevitably, it resulted in a number of constituencies which were not acceptable for the Socialist Party. And then, because this presidential score does not reflect the reality of our territorial roots. 70 constituencies is already a very big sacrifice. You have to have it in mind since I, when I entered the discussion phase with insubordinate France, had invested more than 350 candidates all over France. So you can imagine the number of people who then had to be called back to tell them that he would unfortunately not be a candidate”, comments Pierre Jouvet.
“It’s a long-term alliance to transform the country and to change people’s lives.”
Pierre Jouvet
at franceinfo
An alliance in pain for some but “it was necessary to go through this moment when we were able to demonstrate that it was not just an alliance of circumstance for a few deputy positions.” justifies Pierre Jouvet. While tensions have arisen since the installation of the deputies in the National Assembly, Pierre Jouvet wishes to reassure, “With Olivier Faure, we will be the guarantors of this unity and this gathering. With our specificities, we have and we will have differences. And you know, the differences and the debates should not frighten us. And that’s not because sometimes we will have differences, because sometimes we will have debates even if they are heated, that that will mean that we will return to these quarrels of the past. I believe that we will return to power and responsibilities, yes .” But first with a lot of reconstruction work to do for the Socialist Party and the left, concedes the national secretary in charge of the elections to the PS.