Roussel denies having weighed down Mélenchon and wants to discuss legislative

Europe 1 with AFP 6 p.m., April 13, 2022

The communist Fabien Roussel, who obtained 2.3% of the votes in the first round of the presidential election, defends himself in

for having lost Jean-Luc Mélenchon (22%), who missed the second round for 420,000 votes , and said he was "ready to discuss the rest with him".

The communist candidate regrets, in this interview published on Tuesday, "an allegedly useful vote which siphoned off the votes of many candidates, including me, to the benefit of the first three and to the detriment of political pluralism".

Fabien Roussel rejects the idea that the PCF, support of Jean-Luc Mélenchon in 2012 and 2017, contributed to the defeat of the Insoumis: "The 802,588 voters who voted out of conviction for my candidacy, for Happy Days, n would not have voted for another left-wing candidate".

In addition, "blaming them when there are 12 million abstainers is a bit easy," he added.

Many messages posted on social networks have targeted communist leaders since Sunday.

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While a PCF office in Lille was vandalized and another tagged with the word "traitors" in Nantes, Fabien Roussel felt that "the time should above all not be for invectives".

"On the contrary, faced with the gravity of the situation, we all have a responsibility: first of all to defeat the far right, but also to transform the 32% of the left into a greater number of deputies in the legislative elections" , said the communist.

And the deputy from the North to hope for fruitful discussions: “Noting that he came first from the left with 22%, I congratulated Jean-Luc Mélenchon for his result. I am ready to discuss the rest with him. ".

"We need a strong left in the Assembly to resist the bad blows that are being prepared," he anticipates.

Fabien Roussel hopes that in the discussions on the left are sanctuarized "the outgoing deputies behind whom I wish that we can all find ourselves".

He adds: "There are in more than 120 constituencies a total of votes from the left which is higher than that of the right and that of the extreme right. It is therefore able to win there".