At the Fête de l'Huma, Ruffin booed and Villepin cheered | EUROtoday

UOn stage, two atmospheres. On Saturday night, a left-wing man was booed as quickly as he entered the stage of the Agora, on the Fête de l'Huma; on Sunday lunchtime, a right-wing man was cheered on the identical stage by an enthusiastic crowd. An ex-Insoumis, François Ruffin, was jeered, and a Chirac supporter, Dominique de Villepin, was welcomed with cheers, all in the course of the huge annual celebration of the communist newspaper based in 1904. The distinction is surreal. It says every part concerning the new relationship that La France insoumise has with Ruffin, handled as a pariah.

The iconoclast elected from the Somme, below fireplace from criticism from his former “comrades” since he confided his “shame” of getting led, in 2022, a “racial campaign”, was invited to take part in a debate with Raphaël Arnault, Insoumis deputy elected in July within the 1^D constituency of Vaucluse. The theme of the trade, through which the environmentalist Marie Pochon and the communist elected official Nicolas Sansu additionally participated: “How to unite the working classes to defeat the RN?”

“Building bridges”

From the start, Raphaël Arnault, spokesman for the Young Antifascist Guard and on the S checklist, made himself the voice of the anger he heard within the room. “François, I tell you with the greatest sincerity: you have hurt a lot of comrades, especially the youth […] You are in political error. Dividing the working classes among themselves is not the right way to see the political period,” he preaches. And he firmly declares that there isn’t any level in going to “seduce the racists” and that we should always as an alternative deal with the “anti-racist movements”. It is at this second that the gang sings “Siamo Tutti Antifascisti”.

“If we are honest and take the time to listen to the excerpt again, the song is not intended against Ruffin,” argues one of many occasion's organizers. “The anti-Ruffin stickers were spread by Insoumis who had an interest in harming Ruffin, but that does not at all reflect the entire debate. The reality is more nuanced than what we see on Twitter.”

In truth, in a single hour, the deputy from the Somme skillfully managed to show round a part of the room, which might find yourself applauding him. He first congratulated Arnault on his victory, recalled his “deep electoral and moral disagreement” with Jean-Luc Mélenchon and defined it, earlier than recalling that he needed to “build bridges” the place “the extreme right erects walls”.

“The choice of Jean-Luc Mélenchon [de se concentrer exclusivement sur la jeunesse et les quartiers populaires, NDLR] is suicidal. It does not allow us to be in the majority. It is a choice of abandonment and defeat. We must do everything for all the working classes. It is about not letting anyone down. Winning in Picardy as in Seine-Saint-Denis is never wasting your time,” he explains. Where Ruffin's message may very well be perceived as an absence of need to talk to Mélenchon's voters, he affirms that he needs to talk to everybody, to the Insoumis voters and to its voters, within the Somme, to the voters of “the France of the towers” and to these of “the France of the towns”, in response to his consecrated expression.

Substantive disagreement

“Ultimately, it's quite common on the left. We argue but we always end up reconciling. It was a real family meal,” summed up the organizer of the occasion talked about above. What is notable, nonetheless, is the (very) heat welcome reserved for Dominique de Villepin, former Prime Minister of Jacques Chirac, former Secretary General of the Élysée and determine of the fitting. He gained the general public's favor by stating that Emmanuel Macron ought to have “given a chance” to the New Popular Front. “Would it have lasted? Would the NFP have had the audacity to extend its lines to form a government that could have a majority? That was not up to the President of the Republic to answer in place of the NFP,” he pressured, to the loud applause of left-wing supporters.

He particularly infected the Agora by evoking the topic that earned him the sympathies of the Insoumis: Gaza. Protesting that the conflict was, in response to him, “made invisible”, he added: “The tragedy of Gaza, in the representation, and which further aggravates the frustration of a certain number of peoples of the Global South, is the invisibility of death in Gaza, it is the silence of death in Gaza.” A assured outcry. Activists, seduced by his speech, went to take selfies with him on the finish of his intervention. On Friday, September 13, the previous Minister of Foreign Affairs had even obtained the help of the Palestinian press company Quds News Network, identified to be near Hamas. Dominique de Villepin had given the identical speech on France Inter, on September 12, as on the Fête de l'Huma, denouncing the supposed “silence” of France on this topic.

What can we study from all this? “Everything is said in one weekend,” laments a PS MP. “A part of the left prefers to applaud a man from the right, under the sole pretext that he says exactly what they want to hear, rather than a comrade who is still committed to the left. That says a lot about the mind-boggling sectarianism of LFI.” If Ruffin was convincing when it comes to type, there stays a basic disagreement on the technique to undertake to deal with the voters of the National Rally, handled, as an entire, as “racists” whereas for a few of them they’re left-wing voters dissatisfied by the renunciations of their camp. And Ruffin, who completely couldn’t speak about it inside LFI, realizes that will probably be simply as tough to debate this burning problem from the skin…