The first secretary of the Socialist Party Olivier Faure was indignant on Tuesday at an “incomprehensible slip-up” by the leader of La France insoumise (LFI) Jean-Luc Mélenchon who seemed to call into question the sincerity of the European elections which will take place on Sunday. The leader of the PS also regrets that the former candidate “plays with the yellow line” around anti-Semitism.
The first secretary of the Socialist Party Olivier Faure was indignant on Tuesday at an “incomprehensible slip-up” by the leader of La France insoumise (LFI) Jean-Luc Mélenchon who seemed to call into question the sincerity of the European elections which will take place on Sunday. “We have the right to question the organization of the ballots. What is dramatic is to actually suggest that it would be a manipulation and that it would be a manipulation directed against the only party of La France insoumise, this which makes no sense. It is once again a slip-up which is incomprehensible because we must all, together, defend democracy,” declared the boss of the PS on Sud radio.
No parallel drawn between Mélenchon and Trump
Jean-Luc Mélenchon said on Sunday on the X platform that his movement was going to “trigger a commission of inquiry into the conduct of the elections in France”. “Fed up with deregistered voters in working-class neighborhoods! Fed up with undelivered professions of faith! Fed up with undelivered ballot papers! He’s going to hurt them!”, he wrote. “The elections of 2017 and 2022 were not stolen. They were carried out in conditions that no one can dispute,” Olivier Faure replied on Tuesday.
However, he refused to establish a direct parallel between Jean-Luc Mélenchon and Donald Trump who never recognized the election of his successor to the White House Joe Biden and is accused of having incited his supporters to take stormed the Washington capitol on January 6, 2021. During this interview on Sud Radio, Olivier Faure said he was “struck” by other statements from Jean-Luc Mélenchon who wrote in a blog note that “the anti-Semitism remains residual in France.
“Why play with the yellow line every time?”
“Everything shows that there is, on the contrary, an explosion of anti-Semitism in our country,” he said. “Why? Why play with the yellow line every time?”, he asked about the leader of LFI. “I am both deeply shocked by any anti-Semitic act and I demonstrated against anti-Semitism. And at the same time, since the first day, I have been fighting against the collective punishment that is inflicted on the Palestinians and I wish for recognition of a Palestinian state next to an Israeli state that would live in security,” he added.
He felt that Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s words gave “the feeling again of a form of incomprehensible drift”. The left-wing Nupes alliance between LFI, the socialists, the communists and the ecologists exploded in the fall due to their disagreements on the Middle East after the Hamas attacks on October 7.