Asked about the possibility for the left of triumphing over populism, the former Minister of the Interior affirms: "It will succeed only by breaking clearly with the line of cancel culture, of wokism, of complacency to the regard to the communitarianism which plague certain movements and which are incompatible with the conception that I have of secularism, of the unity and of the indivisibility of the Republic ".
To maintain that "a large part of the left has gone astray", Bernard Cazeneuve refers in particular to the demonstration "against Islamophobia" in November 2019 in Paris, in which several left officials participated, especially Insoumis, environmentalists and far left.
But he also criticizes, without naming her, the former candidate of the PS for the 2021 regional in Île-de-France, Audrey Pulvar, who had declared it desirable that a "white man be silent" during meetings on racial discrimination: " it is the very negation of republican thought and of the universalism that it carries like a hope ".
And he jeers at the Terra Nova think tank which, in view of the 2012 presidential election, recommended that the PS address “minorities as so many reference categories”.
Bernard Cazeneuve explains: "we run desperately behind minorities as well as after so many clienteles, seeking at all costs to seduce them, with the concern of short-term electoral benefits."
However, according to him, "a political party does not have to speak to particular segments of society, but to the whole nation".
The one who was for a time expected to be a candidate for the presidential election also delivers his vision of a possible "union" on the left, currently pushed by the socialist candidate Anne Hidalgo and the former minister Christiane Taubira, who "envisages" a candidacy.
“If there is no strength, there can be no union,” he said. again."
© 2021 AFP