Pedro González
Journalist
While the ultra-leftist Jean-Luc Mélenchon finishes putting together a Popular Union of the Left for the legislative elections next June, the political camp in favour of the re-elected president of the French Republic, Emmanuel Macron, is countering him with a confederal alliance that would be called Together (Ensemble). In short, it would mean that on the political-electoral battlefield, voters would be faced exclusively with a new version of the old left-right, progressive-conservative, or sovereigntist-Europeanist antagonism.
Mélenchon, who did not willingly resign himself to the fact that he was not the finalist to oppose Macron in the second and decisive round of the recent presidential elections, considers that he has a good chance of winning the legislative elections, which would force the president of the nation to appoint him as prime minister and then create a government of presumably explosive cohabitation.
What Mélenchon has in common with the extremist Marine Le Pen of the opposite camp is that they both claim to be nationalists, staunch defenders of the most disadvantaged, champions of “the social” and willing to flout the rules of the European Union for the sake of a sovereignism that is supposedly superior to that of European citizens, very similar, by the way, to that which is so criticised in governments such as those of Poland and Hungary. The main victim of the leader of France Insoumise is the Socialist Party, which in the last gasps has already offered to join Mélenchon and his almost consummated Popular Union as a last lifeline. As an epitaph, the former president François Hollande had already written beforehand: “The Socialist Party [if it signs an agreement with Mélenchon] has decided to disappear”.
Macron, in any case, has not taken the threat to his project as a joke if the results of the legislative elections were to undermine his pro-European project, which he proclaims would also be the best guarantee of general prosperity, and especially that of France itself.
As a result, and under the aegis of Stanislas Guérini, secretary general of La République en Marche (LREM), an alliance called Together is being put together, made up of two other formations of a markedly centrist nature: Horizons, led by Macron’s former prime minister, the mayor of Le Havre, Édouard Philippe, and the Democratic Movement (Modem) of the veteran politician François Bayrou, perhaps the MP who has surfed the choppy waters of the French National Assembly best and longest since he entered it in the early 1980s.
Another major change, at least of an emotional nature, is that LREM will also change its name. Initially, the party’s name was simply En Marche, whose initials also corresponded to those of the then presidential hopeful, Emmanuel Macron. It was the idea of his own wife, Brigitte. Later, the letters LR, the Republic, were added to temper what some saw as an overbearing presidential egocentrism.
Well, for the legislative elections, the new name will also seek to excite and inspire young and old alike, who, according to the polls, are fed up with politics and politicians. So the new name chosen for the occasion will be Renaissance.
In the agreements already outlined for Together, Renaissance has reserved 400 constituencies exclusively for itself, leaving 58 for Horizons and 109 for Modem. The alliance thus stipulates that they will not compete against each other and that in each constituency there will only be a single candidate under the unitary Together acronym.
It is assumed that the opposite camp, that of the left’s Popular Union, will do the same, although Mélenchon is for the moment proceeding to put together a single list, having already reached agreements, arguably of absolute submission to his Insoumise France, with Europe Ecology The Greens (EELV), the remaining shreds of the Communist Party (PCF) and the wreckage of the Socialist Party (PSF).
The 577 seats at stake will also be decided in two rounds, with a second round unnecessary if a candidate obtains more than 50% of the vote in the first round. With this scheme of alliances, Marine Le Pen’s National Rally (RN) appears in the middle and almost as a referee with a good chance of winning, which also aspires not only to consolidate its undeniable advance from the presidential elections, but even to beat Mélenchon again, although this time the latter is backed this time by groups that have not even been able to recover their electoral costs because they have not surpassed the 5% barrier of the vote.
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