France’s radical left-wing La France insoumise has charged MEP Manon Aubry to ‘coordinate’ the European Elections campaign for 2024, aiming to form a single leftist list.
“The debate on a joint NUPES [the left-wing coalition in France] list for the European elections has been relaunched! Faced with the ecological and social emergency, unity is a duty: for La France Insoumise, I will coordinate our campaign to obtain it”, Aubry said on X, formally Twitter. The French MEP was already running La France insoumise’s list for the 2019 European elections.
To achieve a single left-wing list for the June 2024 ballot, “we have proposed to EELV [the Greens] to head the joint list”, explained LF in a statement published on Tuesday, as the green party came top of the left-wing parties in 2019, with 13,5% of the vote.
However, the communists and ecologists have already presented candidates to head their respective lists. These are Léon Deffontaines and Marie Toussaint, who seem determined to compete independently.
“We maintain our proposal that the head of the list should come from EELV (Europe Ecologie – Les Verts) and the guarantee that everyone will have their place in the European Parliament”, adds LFI in its press release, ruling out the possibility of Ségolène Royal.
Royal is a former Socialist candidate who faced Nicolas Sarkozy in 200 and has become closer to Mélenchon’s movement since she backed him in the 2022 presidential election. She sparked confusion some days ago at the LFI summer school when she declared that she wanted to head a list uniting the left, with the support of LFI, for the next European elections.
“It has been told that we intend […] to form a La France insoumise list headed by Ségolène Royal. This is not what we have said and what we are saying”, clarified the LFI coordination in its statement while thanking Royal for her proposal.
“A united list is possible”, according to Mélenchon’s radical left movement, recalling the many supporters of this joint initiative, from the Socialists’ former presidential candidate in 2017, Benoît Hamon, to Socialist MP Jérôme Guedj.
Among those who consider it necessary to “study this option” without ruling it out outright are the ecologists Sandrine Rousseau, MP and figure of the left wing of the Greens, and Julien Bayou, former national secretary of the party.
The first secretary of the Socialist Party (PS), Olivier Faure, said he would “never be an obstacle to the path towards union” of the left and that if EELV agreed to discuss a united list, he would participate in discussions on the subject. The PS is nevertheless preparing an independent list.
The balance of power
With this initiative, the radical left-wing movement wants to “defeat the Macronist bloc and the Rassemblement National list” to counter “the wave of social abuse coming from the government and a convergence of the right and the far right around the latter’s programme”.
A united NUPES list led by ecologist Marie Toussaint, Manon Aubry or Olivier Faure would garner 25% of voting intentions, according to a Cluster17 poll published in August, putting them slightly ahead of the Rassemblement National (24%) and the Renaissance list (20%).
Separately, according to the surveys, the top three left-wing lists (PS, LFI, EELV) would achieve between 8% and 10%, thus gathering more MEPs than if they ran together, and the Communists between 3% and 5%. This balance of power is confirmed by the Ifop poll published in Sunday’s JDD.
In an interview published in Politis on Tuesday, Aubry said she does not want to “play a game […] to steal one or two seats” one another by running separately “at a time when a ‘reactionary arc’ is strengthening from the right to the far right throughout Europe”.
(Davide Basso | EURACTIV.fr)
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