in Sotteville-lès-Rouen, Raphaël Glucksmann offers hope to socialist voters | EUROtoday

The picture of unity was stunning and undoubtedly mandatory for the Socialist Party (PS). A little bit over a yr after their confrontation on the Marseille congress, throughout which the get together was torn between professional and anti-Nupes (New Ecological and Social Popular Union), the primary secretary of the get together, Olivier Faure, and the mayor from Rouen, Nicolas Mayer-Rossignol, had been gathered across the head of the PS-Place publique record Raphaël Glucksmann, Wednesday April 3, throughout a gathering in Sotteville-lès-Rouen. All collectively, they appeared to place the heartbreaks of January 2023 behind them to stay up for a future that they hope will probably be blissful on the night of Sunday June 9, the date of the European election in France.

The future will inform whether or not it is a reunion that can final or a easy parenthesis, throughout the European election marketing campaign. But within the meantime, the chief of Place publique has no less than achieved the feat of calming dissensions inside the Socialist Party.

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Nicolas Mayer-Rossignol additionally thanked the MEP elected in 2019. “Here, we chase away the specters and first of all that of divisions. Olivier and Raphaël, we are together at the heart of the common fight. We come together for Europe, for our values, for French people,” he mentioned. “Thanks to Raphaël and thanks to this campaign, I am proud to say that today we are taking a clear line,” he added, referring to a “spectre of indecision”, in reference to the alliance with La France insoumise, whose European undertaking is extra eurosceptic.

Present among the many 500 spectators who got here to fill the small room of the Trianon, François, 86 years outdated, is a type of socialist members who took a dim view of the alliance with Jean-Luc Mélenchon's get together. “Our friend Olivier Faure has made quite a few mistakes, I find it hard to forgive him,” he explains, happy regardless of all the pieces to see the socialists gathered for the event.

This European marketing campaign permits him at the moment to neglect what he thought-about to be an erasure of the PS inside the Nupes. Two years after the debacle of Anne Hidalgo within the presidential election (1.75% of the vote) and the left alliance within the legislative elections, the voice of the socialists is heard once more, he considers.

The record carried by Raphaël Glucksmann collects 13% of voting intentions in a Toluna-Harris Interactive ballot for Challenges, M6 and RTL, printed Wednesday April 3, and provides hope to Socialist members and sympathizers of the likelihood on this poll of a match three with the National Rally (31% voting intentions in the identical survey) and the Renaissance-MoDem-Horizons record (17%).

“There are three visions in these elections”

For the MEP, it’s this hope particularly that adjustments the scenario in 2024.

“Everywhere, we encounter the same hope, everywhere there is the same requirement, the same expectation,” he advised the viewers, primarily composed of retired members of the PS. The Elysée strategists had deliberate one more duel between Emmanuel Macron and the far proper. We have disrupted these plans. We have began to indicate that there are three visions in these elections.”

Leaving aside possible attacks aimed at their left-wing competitors, the speakers therefore preferred to enter into the conversation between Jordan Bardella and Valérie Hayer, the heads of the list of the National Rally and the presidential majority.

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“The far right are thieves, charlatans of votes,” attacks Nicolas Mayer-Rossignol, pointing out the inconsistency of their speeches and their votes in the European Parliament. “This President of the Republic who had to block the extreme right is the one who offered them an ideological victory with the immigration law and this idea of ​​national preference”, targets Olivier Faure for his part, before letting Raphaël Glucksmann develop this what does the Socialist Party intend to do in this campaign.

For the latter, the European Union must become an “industrial energy”, an “ecological energy”, a “social energy”, a “humanist energy” and a “feminist energy”.

Accused by certain detractors of only speaking so far about the war in Ukraine, Raphaël Glucksmann has tried to talk about other subjects, more related to the daily life of Europeans and the French in particular.

“Remake the European continent a continent of producers”

The former advisor to the Georgian President Mikheïl Saakashvili regretted that Europe had become a continent of “consumers”. “We have become consumers of security produced in the United States,” he first emphasized, raising the specter of a new election of Donald Trump and American military protection which would disappear.

“We are also energy consumers,” he continued, criticizing the European Union’s dependence on fossil fuels, particularly from Russia and Azerbaijan.

“We are also consumers of goods produced in China in all strategic sectors,” he finally asserted, again highlighting that “we are no longer capable of producing what we need, including in vital sectors.

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To put an finish to those dependencies, Raphaël Glucksmann proposes to “marry ecological transition and reindustrialization” with a view to “remake the European continent a continent of producers”. According to him, this presupposes “breaks with the religion of free trade” and “the myth of free and undistorted competition”.

A approach to seduce each center-left voters disenchanted by the Emmanuel Macron expertise, whereas talking to left-wing voters tempted by an environmentalist or rebellious vote, with out forgetting loyal socialist voters.

“People like Manon Aubry have much clearer ideas, which do not bring people together. What we want for Europe is a union, a coming together, and that is what Raphaël Glucksmann is proposing with his convictions” , judges Sylvie, 71, who had already voted for him 5 years in the past.

But in contrast to 2019, when he completed with solely 6.19% of the votes, Raphaël Glucksmann envisages a way more optimistic end result. “We must convey this message: an alternative exists,” he chanted on the conclusion of his speech, simply earlier than singing the Italian revolutionary track “Bella Ciao”.