François Hollande talks concerning the left's troubled relationship with energy | EUROtoday

Book. “Power is a mirror for the left, it attracts it as much as it frightens it. This ambivalence, this eternal back and forth punctuates its history.” In his newest work, The Challenge of Governing. The Left and Power from the Dreyfus Affair to the Present Day (Perrin, 416 pages, 23 euros), François Hollande defines, from the primary two sentences, the horrible equation to which the left, born “in a revolutionary perspective”has been confronted because the nineteenth century^e century.

“Is the left's vocation to protest, to contest, to overthrow a predatory and inhuman capitalism?” Or “to take its part in correcting the damage of an order it fights?”, François Hollande pretends to marvel, as if echoing the New Popular Front (NFP), caught between the intransigence of Jean-Luc Mélenchon and the Socialist Party's (PS) makes an attempt at compromise. For François Hollande, these questions are purely rhetorical. In his guide, the previous president solutions them right away, expressing his choice for social democracy, which has allowed the institution of the “fundamentals” of our societies, comparable to labor regulation, secularism, public schooling or social safety. Radicalism should persist, however stay on the margins.

From the Tours Congress in 1920, which gave rise to the Socialist Party and the Communist Party, to the Popular Front, by way of the double seven-year time period of François Mitterrand, and the “plural left” From Lionel Jospin to the final throes of the NFP, the previous head of state goes again in time and units about demonstrating, via historical past, the relevance of his thesis. That of a left that wins when its middle of gravity is reformist quite than radical. From the start of the twentieth century^e century, this duality is embodied via two figures, that of Jean Jaurès, who wished to manipulate within the title of the consolidation of the Republic, and the rigid Jules Guesde, who advocated staying away “of a bourgeois government”.

The Epinay Congress, an instance to comply with

But the success of the left can also be the mixture of two antagonistic sides, which feed off one another. The creator returns to the Popular Front and its social conquests, so related because the emergence of the NFP, ruled by a Léon Blum who “marries both theses “, and succeeds in combining radicalism with “compromise ensuring stability and progress”. For François Hollande, it can’t be in comparison with the NFP, as a result of, in 1936, society was swept away by “an irrepressible and inventive movement”, he wrote in reference to the social actions of the time. In addition, Léon Blum “convinces himself that he exercises power”whereas the “rebels”, “despite their proclamations”solely want “the acceleration of the presidential calendar”.

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