The image of unity was beautiful and undoubtedly necessary for the Socialist Party (PS). A little over a year after their confrontation at the Marseille congress, during which the party was torn between pro and anti-Nupes (New Ecological and Social Popular Union), the first secretary of the party, Olivier Faure, and the mayor from Rouen, Nicolas Mayer-Rossignol, were gathered around the head of the PS-Place publique list Raphaël Glucksmann, Wednesday April 3, during a meeting in Sotteville-lès-Rouen. All together, they seemed to put the heartbreaks of January 2023 behind them to look forward to a future that they hope will be happy on the evening of Sunday June 9, the date of the European election in France.

The future will tell whether this is a reunion that will last or a simple parenthesis, during the European election campaign. But in the meantime, the leader of Place publique has at least achieved the feat of calming dissensions within the Socialist Party.

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Nicolas Mayer-Rossignol also thanked the MEP elected in 2019. “Here, we chase away the specters and first of all that of divisions. Olivier and Raphaël, we are together at the heart of the common fight. We come together for Europe, for our values, for French people,” he said. “Thanks to Raphaël and thanks to this campaign, I am proud to say that today we are taking a clear line,” he added, referring to a “spectre of indecision”, in reference to the alliance with La France insoumise, whose European project is more eurosceptic.

Present among the 500 spectators who came to fill the small room of the Trianon, François, 86 years old, is one of those socialist members who took a dim view of the alliance with Jean-Luc Mélenchon's party. “Our friend Olivier Faure has made quite a few mistakes, I find it hard to forgive him,” he explains, satisfied despite everything to see the socialists gathered for the occasion.

This European campaign allows him today to forget what he considered to be an erasure of the PS within the Nupes. Two years after the debacle of Anne Hidalgo in the presidential election (1.75% of the vote) and the left alliance in the legislative elections, the voice of the socialists is heard again, he considers.

The list carried by Raphaël Glucksmann collects 13% of voting intentions in a Toluna-Harris Interactive poll for Challenges, M6 and RTL, published Wednesday April 3, and gives hope to Socialist members and sympathizers of the possibility of a match in this election three with the National Rally (31% voting intentions in the same survey) and the Renaissance-MoDem-Horizons list (17%).

“There are three visions in these elections”

For the MEP, it is this hope in particular that changes the situation in 2024.

“Everywhere, we encounter the same hope, everywhere there is the same requirement, the same expectation,” he told the audience, mainly composed of retired members of the PS. The Elysée strategists had planned yet another duel between Emmanuel Macron and the far right. We have disrupted those plans. We have started to show that there are three visions in these elections."

Leaving aside possible attacks aimed at their left-wing competitors, the speakers therefore preferred to enter into the conversation between Jordan Bardella and Valérie Hayer, the heads of the list of the National Rally and the presidential majority.

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“The far right are thieves, charlatans of votes,” attacks Nicolas Mayer-Rossignol, pointing out the inconsistency of their speeches and their votes in the European Parliament. “This President of the Republic who had to block the extreme right is the one who offered them an ideological victory with the immigration law and this idea of ​​national preference”, targets Olivier Faure for his part, before letting Raphaël Glucksmann develop this what does the Socialist Party intend to do in this campaign.

For the latter, the European Union must become an "industrial power", an "ecological power", a "social power", a "humanist power" and a "feminist power".

Accused by certain detractors of only speaking so far about the war in Ukraine, Raphaël Glucksmann has tried to talk about other subjects, more related to the daily life of Europeans and the French in particular.

“Remake the European continent a continent of producers”

The former advisor to the Georgian President Mikheïl Saakashvili regretted that Europe had become a continent of “consumers”. “We have become consumers of security produced in the United States,” he first emphasized, raising the specter of a new election of Donald Trump and American military protection which would disappear.

“We are also energy consumers,” he continued, criticizing the European Union’s dependence on fossil fuels, particularly from Russia and Azerbaijan.

“We are also consumers of goods produced in China in all strategic sectors,” he finally asserted, again highlighting that “we are no longer capable of producing what we need, including in vital sectors.

Read alsoEuropeans: Ukraine at the heart of the campaign, a risky strategy for Emmanuel Macron

To put an end to these dependencies, Raphaël Glucksmann proposes to “marry ecological transition and reindustrialization” in order to “remake the European continent a continent of producers”. According to him, this presupposes “breaks with the religion of free trade” and “the myth of free and undistorted competition”.

A way to seduce both center-left voters disappointed by the Emmanuel Macron experience, while speaking to left-wing voters tempted by an environmentalist or rebellious vote, without forgetting loyal socialist voters.

“People like Manon Aubry have much clearer ideas, which do not unite. What we want for Europe is a union, a coming together, and that is what Raphaël Glucksmann is proposing with his convictions” , judges Sylvie, 71, who had already voted for him five years ago.

But unlike 2019, when he finished with only 6.19% of the votes, Raphaël Glucksmann envisages a much more optimistic outcome. “We must convey this message: an alternative exists,” he chanted at the conclusion of his speech, just before singing the Italian revolutionary song “Bella Ciao”.

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