YouThe left, unanimously, angrily denies this. This is how the Left presented itself on Saturday 21 September, when the composition of Barnier’s government was announced. And, in the process, the verdict was handed down: immediate censure, nothing to negotiate! For the President of the Republic, the tragedy of the dissolution continues day after day. His bet, on the evening of 9 June, was to complete the work undertaken in 2017: to break up the Left in order to widen the centre after the enormous gap that appeared during the European campaign between the Glucksmann camp and the Mélenchonist troops. The unity of the Left, on the contrary, has been strengthened despite the multiple failures that have been eating away at the New Popular Ecological and Social Union for two years.
First, it was reorganised around the fight against the National Rally, whose dangerousness did not need to be demonstrated. Then it turned against Emmanuel Macron and his exercise of power, as the head of state tried to overcome his side’s defeat in the legislative elections and to put some order into the mess he had created. His refusal to appoint, in a National Assembly without a majority, a prime minister from the ranks of the New Popular Front (NFP), on the pretext of an immediate censure, when this coalition was in first place, maintained a powerful feeling of injustice among the left-wing electorate and fuelled a democratic misunderstanding that does not weaken.
Anger was therefore expressed and sometimes exaggerated in the reactions of the various representatives of the NFP, including the most moderate, when they discovered the composition of Michel Barnier’s minority government: a coalition of defeated parties, increasingly inclined to the right, including one, Les Républicains (LR), which had also exonerated itself from the Republican front. “There had to be a change, we have the Restoration”shrieked former President of the Republic François Hollande. “An arm of honour to democracy”protested the first secretary of the Socialist Party (PS), Olivier Faure.
Breakup declared
Of course, there is a fair amount of bad faith and silence in the staging of what others describe as“democratic scam”. In their anger, the Socialists forget to consider that if they had really pushed for Bernard Cazeneuve’s candidacy, Michel Barnier’s would not have existed, that if a part of the so-called “governing” left had agreed to govern, the Socialists would not have had an inevitable return to power of the more conservative right, and if the culture of compromise had been fully present in this Assembly without a majority, we would not be here. This is not their issue.
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