The title is frankly optimistic, Happy days are ahead of us ; content, slightly darker. The national secretary of the French Communist Party, Fabien Roussel, promotes his latest book, released this week by Editions du Cherche-Midi (160 pages, 14.90 euros), with a certain pain. In front of the brick chimney of his house in Saint-Amand-les-Eaux (Nord), on a double-page photo in Paris Match, he encloses his wife, his eyes unfocused. And confess to the magazine “a subject that [lui] it hurts “the search of his home in December 2022 following an article by Mediapart, in February 2022, reporting suspicions of fictitious employment in his regard.
In his book, he is not far from explicitly designating the “rebellious” as responsible for these denunciations, qualified as “lies”. “Stop now? Temptation does not even touch me. Yet this is the clear purpose of this article and its initiators. Those who accuse me are political adversaries”writes Mr. Roussel.
Since at least the first round of the presidential election, a lingering resentment between the leadership of the Communist Party (PCF) and that of La France insoumise (LFI) has set in. As summarized by the LFI deputy for Seine-Saint-Denis Raquel Garrido, who regrets this “fratricidal war”, “Roussel generally pays for the suspicion of having caused Mélenchon to lose”. It is in particular against this idea that the communist takes up his pen. The 400,000 votes that the LFI candidate missed to reach the second round are not his doing, he pleads. “I’m the one who should be complaining about the role of the polls in the days preceding the vote, the reversal of voters, the ‘useful vote’! »
The “construction in pain” of the Nupes
The electoral lessons of 2022 do not stop scrambling communists and “rebellious”. Fabien Roussel, a bit like the LFI deputy for the Somme François Ruffin did after the legislative elections, does not lack anecdotes to illustrate the rejection of Jean-Luc Mélenchon in his constituency: home help who says he prefers Marine Le Pen to the latter to the sympathizer launching, at the beginning of a meeting for the legislative elections, “Since you have allied yourself with Mélenchon, we will not vote for you”.
“Bringing a party to life means accepting that there are differences and disagreements”, “As often with us, it all started with a collective discussion” : difficult to identify all the sentences in the book that can be read as hollow criticisms of the functioning of LFI. Fabien Roussel marks his difference on the merits, as with nuclear power, “a sector of the future”, or his attachment to political parties. And especially on work, a key subject, because it persists in the path traced in September 2022 with its criticisms of the “benefit left” and says that it wishes for quality jobs, decent wages and a society “free from substitute income”. His promise? It is summed up in conclusion in a sentence by Jaurès: “To restore the dignity of the working class to the wealth of the nation”.
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