Invited to the congress of the Radical Left Party on Saturday, Bernard Cazeneuve is increasingly posing as the standard bearer of an anti-Nupes left in search of incarnation, even if the former Socialist Prime Minister, who has just launched his movement , claims to move forward quietly.
"I'm not doing this for me", assured Saturday the former minister of François Hollande, in front of the militants of the PRG gathered in Labège (Haute-Garonne). Bernard Cazeneuve, who left the Socialist Party in 2022, just after the Nupes agreement concluded between the PS, LFI, EELV and the PCF, announced this week the name of his movement, launched a fortnight ago to federate the left tendencies hostile to this alliance: "the Convention".
His initiative, which allows dual membership with a party, is the logical continuation of his "manifesto" for "another left", launched in September, which had collected some 6,000 signatures. The former minister invited all those who share the same values as him to "come together, in a spirit of harmony", castigating those "who in politics proceed by insults and violence", in an allusion to the tumult provoked in particular by LFI in the Assembly during the debate on pensions.
He himself was attacked on Saturday morning by left-wing activists, including LFI and NPA, according to Ladépêche.fr, during his trip to Foix to support a dissident PS candidate in the partial legislative Ariège.
"I'm not looking to create a buzz, nor to orchestrate the din," he told Agence France Presse on Friday, denouncing the current political "collapse" and pinning down the Nupes strategy "which manufactures far-right votes in industrial quantities".
His objective: the "progressive" structuring of a "collective reflection", he explains, to "federate a humanist left" and "provider of solutions" which is "for social justice and economic development", "against productivist growth, but also against degrowth", "for carbon-free energy, but to modernize the nuclear fleet".
"The movement is being built modestly", assures the former tenant of Matignon, who already has "nearly 4,000 members". "More than a club, less than a party", underlines the one who wants to "go everywhere on the territory and convince that it is necessary to recover".
On Saturday, he obtained a new breakthrough: the accession of the Radical Left Party (3,500 activists) to La Convention, announced by its president Guillaume Lacroix, re-elected without surprise at the head of his party. "Faced with the risk of an extreme right in power, it is our duty to build a credible left, which gives confidence", explained the latter, who refused to integrate the Nupes.
Bernard Cazeneuve also aspires "for as many socialists as possible to join the movement", he told AFP, specifying that "many, in the sensitivity of Nicolas Mayer-Rossignol or Hélène Geoffroy", both hostile to the Nupes, have already done so. But "with his line, neither Macron nor Mélenchon, we go back three squares. By doing that, we are nowhere. We must assume that we are on the left, with the Insoumis, "said a pro-Nupes socialist elected official.
"No one wants to fall behind him. It's a speculative bubble,” adds another. When the rebellious leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon criticizes in him a "notarial, polite and well-dressed left", Bernard Cazeneuve is surprised: "Today, when you have the precision of a lawyer and the politeness of a Republican, you are suspicious”.
For him, it would be "absurd" to defend any personal ambition, "if one has neither political force nor project". "If there is someone who embodies this line in 2027, I will support this person, if I am asked to take responsibility, I will take it," he concedes, however.
In Labège, he also stressed that the socialist president of the Occitanie region, Carole Delga, also anti-Nupes and present at the PRG Congress, had "so much to bring to the country". But Guillaume Lacroix, who "walks with him" for several months, does not hide that he would see the former Prime Minister commit. "He's a statesman," he insists. "He's moving forward, he wants to create something, he's facing his destiny."
