“In Marseille the united left has enabled victory” and wants to be a school
After a presidential election in scattered order, the various left-wing parties are currently trying to build a union with rebellious France for the legislative elections. While the PCF and the PS begin discussions, a first agreement was announced Sunday evening with EELV, which is delighted with Fabien Perez, president of the ecological group of Marseille. “We are starting to learn the lessons of the past. In Marseille, the united left allowed the victory, ”he recalls. That of June 2020, when the Marseille Spring, a coalition of the left – but without LFI – won the city led for twenty-five years by the right and Jean-Claude Gaudin. Can this model become a school at the national level? In Marseille, its actors strongly intimating in any case to the rally.
In the Marseille procession on May 1, the various members of the municipal majority, from the PS, the PCF, EELV or even “Mad Mars”, citizen training, gave this union a view. Starting with Benoît Payan, the socialist mayor who celebrated on the networks “a united and united May 1st”. On the same day, all the organizations of this municipal majority signed in Release a forum calling for “unity here and elsewhere”. A position, however, not obvious within the Socialist Party, some figures of which openly oppose an agreement with LFI. “There are debates in the PS today. This clarifies things, and there was a need for it, ”comments Yannick Ohanessian, deputy mayor and boss of the local PS.
The PCF “does not doubt an agreement”
Another member of the municipal majority from a historic left-wing party, Nathalie Tessier, elected PCF, “does not doubt an agreement” while the party gathered its members this Monday evening. For the Mad Mars collective, of which Oliva Fortin is the president and whose raison d’être is “to be able to access responsibilities to change things”, the union will be made, with or without the BIA. “If there weren’t to be a national agreement for this union, we would do it locally,” she says. Because if within the municipal majority of Marseilles, the agreement is obvious, that projected nationally with the legislative ones is done around an actor without local mandate and this one would have much to gain there.
Mohamed Bensaada, LFI leader of the 3rd district, sees these negotiations with a good eye. “The agreement with EELV shows that we can overcome our differences and I am hopeful”. Beyond the legislative elections, the challenge is for him and his party to find a place for themselves in a local political landscape. “If we are together on an election as important as the legislative ones, we are entering a new sequence and this opens up extremely interesting prospects for the next electoral deadlines”, he wants to believe. It remains to be seen whether LFI will succeed in transforming itself into a locally deployed political formation.