The former Minister of the Interior has once again denied any personal ambition in front of the press but, in the sports palace of Créteil, his speech has taken on the accents of a candidate, to the delight of the activists.

The former mayor of Cherbourg left the PS after the Nupes agreement concluded more than a year ago with LFI, EELV, communists and socialists. With his movement La Convention, launched last March, he intends to federate left-wing tendencies hostile to this alliance to prevent the arrival of the far right in power.

"This is the left of government that is changing the life you are trying to revive in front of about 2,000 people, in sweltering heat.

And faced with "those who seem to fear" that he is a candidate, to launch: "when you have been a candidate 12 times in an election, nothing prevents you from being a candidate a 13th time".

While Olivier Faure, the boss of the PS, estimated in the week that this anti-Nupes left was a dead end, Bernard Cazeneuve retorted to see rather "a wide avenue, not to say a boulevard".

He assured the room of his "will", his "stubbornness" and his "determination" because "the Nation aspires to another path". But "this is a case that requires a lot of energy. We are a bit like crossing the Himalayas without the mittens," he told reporters a little later.

Very severe on the "strategy of confrontation" developed by La France insoumise for six years, he teased: "no, sound and fury are not an option for the French."

He also criticized Olivier Faure: "I never thought that in PS, the S stands for sectarian."

The entire anti-Mélenchon left had made an appointment for this first public meeting of his movement, which now has 7,000 members.

"First from left"

Before a debate on Europe with former Belgian Prime Minister Elio di Rupo, former Italian Prime Minister Enrico Letta and former European Parliament President Martin Schulz, François Hollande justified his presence.

The challenge is to be able to "reconstitute the great left force that the country needs" but "there is no victory on the left if it is not this force that is the first on the left," he said.

For the 2024 European elections, Bernard Cazeneuve pleaded, like the former head of state, for a left-wing list "resolutely European, which does not confuse dictators with representatives of the free world".

In the audience, mostly composed of white heads, were in particular the local representatives of La Convention, many socialist personalities such as the former First Secretary of the PS Jean-Christophe Cambadelis or the former president of the National Assembly Claude Bartolone, but also representatives of the left of Macronia, such as Gilles Savary.

The representatives of the Refoundations movement - the anti-Nupes line inside the PS - who are also trying to federate this left government, were mostly on video.

"Together, together, we are the left," said Guillaume Lacroix, president of the Radical Left Party, which supports Bernard Cazeneuve's initiative.

Social democracy, "it is a movement in gestation that is beginning to become fashionable again," said Jean-Christophe Cambadelis, who also organized a rally in mid-May.

Bernard Cazeneuve is convinced that in the end, all these initiatives will come together. "We must create the conditions for a large base of the left of government so that there is a political force in the perspective of the upcoming deadlines," he told AFP.

© 2023 AFP