The Socialist Party still divided on the alliance with Nupes

After having worked to unite the left, will Olivier Faure succeed in maintaining unity in his party? This is the challenge of this return to the first secretary of the Socialist Party (PS), whose elected officials and activists meet in Blois, Friday August 26 and Saturday August 27, for its traditional summer universities.

Nearly four months after the alliance forged with La France insoumise (LFI), environmentalists and communists for the legislative elections, the New People’s Ecological and Social Union (Nupes) will once again be at the heart of discussions among the socialists. . If, for its supporters, it allowed the PS to keep a group in the National Assembly, with 31 deputies, its critics still deplore the stranglehold of the “rebellious” in this agreement.

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During these two days, the Socialists will debate their place in this union of the left and the alliances to be built: the PS notably invited the environmental candidate for the presidential election, Yannick Jadot, the “rebellious” deputy for Seine-Saint-Denis Clémentine Autain or the communist Frédéric Boccara.

More nuanced votes

For Jérôme Guedj, PS deputy from Essonne in charge of relations with Nupes, the first weeks in the National Assembly demonstrated the full merits of this programmatic and electoral agreement for the PS. “Who could have counted three months ago that the PS would have a group in the Assembly, which weighs in the orientations of the Nupes, which expresses its agreements, its disagreements …”, he asks. An observation shared by one of the new socialist faces, the Calvados deputy Arthur Delaporte, for whom the start of this XVI^e legislature has “allowed to show those who thought that the Nupes was an alliance of circumstance that on the contrary there was a window to build something in time”.

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For the two elected officials, the socialist group led by Boris Vallaud has succeeded “to assert its uniqueness” in a Nupes intergroup dominated by LFI and its 75 deputies. If the “rebellious” elected officials assumed from the start, in substance and form, a frontal opposition against the government’s measures, the votes of the Socialist deputies are more nuanced. In particular, they voted in favor of the Covid-19 bill and abstained on the text concerning purchasing power, while the other Nupes groups opposed it. “The PS deputies played the alliance with the Nupes when it was necessary and the difference when it was necessary too”recognizes the leader of the Socialist senators, Patrick Kanner, who likes to recall that the Socialist parliamentarians – deputies and senators combined – have the largest contingent on the left.

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