Quatennens case, reorganization of LFI … The triple presidential candidate is challenged even in his camp for his positions and his lack of opening. Without an official function, the founder of the 71 -year -old Nuts, considers himself recalled by the circumstances to put order in his movement.
by Julie Carriat and Sandrine Cassini
“Thank you to all of you who take the risk of frequenting the devil so close!” This is how Jean-Luc Mélenchon designates, Monday, January 16, in front of a studious assembly of researchers, experts and activists gathered for A meeting of its new reflection group, the Institut La Boétie, devoted to pensions. Among the intellectuals, he spends “extraordinary” moments, he says, forgets the vicissitudes. “If I don’t write, it’s not going,” says the septuagenarian, who prepares a new version of his programmatic book L’Ere du Peuple (Fayard, 2014). From pretender to Matignon, the former deputy who asked that he is elected Prime Minister at the time of the legislative elections, in June 2022, became in a few months a more disputed figure than ever, including in his own camp.
Failing to win it, the new Ecological and Social People’s Popular Union (Nuts) which it was able to manufacture, however, saved the presence of the left in the National Assembly. But by defending the deputy of North Adrien Quatennens, condemned for domestic violence, he alienated the feminists; For his former fellow travelers, absent from the new management of La France Insoumise (LFI), he is the orchestrator of a quasi-surgery. The devil, we tell you. Child, Jean-Luc Mélenchon has long been a choir child. Longer than Trotskyist, he promises. But he completed his conversion. When he talks about the Marxist vulgate, he says “the catechism” or “the Church”.
For his former friends who look at him from afar, the reorganization carried out at Christmas within LFI recalls that Jean-Luc Mélenchon is first of all a Lambertist, of inheritance at least. From a chic restaurant at the Gare de Lyon, he talks about the “two or three years” passed to the internationalist communist organization, known for its muscular methods and its taste for secrecy. “Santerre, Mélenchon, you mix everything!” Said him the management at the time, calling him by his militant pseudonym inspired by the brigadier general of the French Revolution, and judging him in full confusion between the party, the union , the movement.
“The real boss is manu”
Populist catch-all, it was already. But he kept methods of lambertism. For a long time, the leader of the radical left believes that a “homogeneous and well-organized group” can take power and go to the presidency “, recalls Marie-Noëlle Lienemann, former friend of the socialist left, the left of the left of the left of Socialist Party (PS) in the 1990s. He likes to surround himself with young intelligent people “which he can say that he has trained them,” she continues. “The party is strengthened by leaning” is not quite its maxim, but he readily assumes that there is “crumpled sheet” with each reorganization of its creation.
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