Amine El Khatmi is co-founder and president of Printemps Républicain. He wrote
Combats pour la France
(éd Fayard) in 2019 and published
Printemps Républicain
(éd. L'Observatoire, 2021) this fall.
He also supported Emmanuel Macron during the presidential campaign.
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The Socialist Party has undertaken to negotiate an alliance with La France insoumise of Jean-Luc Mélenchon in view of the legislative elections.
This rapprochement is not guided by a convergence of programs or a coalition of ideas for France and the French.
It is only dictated by fragile convictions, very sensitive to prevailing winds, and by Darwinian circumstances.
All while betraying everything socialists have fought for for decades, and denying what they accomplished when they were in charge.
We must take up the paradoxes of this situation to understand that what is at stake today goes well beyond the survival of a party.
The first is that for five years, the Socialist Party has deplored the supposed personalization of power by Emmanuel Macron and the collapse of Parliament.
It will therefore be necessary to explain the reversal which today leads the Socialists to ally themselves with a Jean-Luc Mélenchon who shows worrying dispositions to personal power and a very weak capacity to accept contradiction.
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The second relates to the idea that socialists have of political commitment.
There is in the PS, in which I campaigned for many years, a certain idea of the left.
The tradition of a sincere attachment to the truth of the world, to the dignity of people and to the complexity of reality.
How then can we understand that this historical and philosophical anchoring is today enslaved, for reasons of low politics, to populist lies, to the legitimization of violence and the oversimplification, to the point of excess, of public debate?
Is it under the leadership of an irritable and unpredictable personality, in constant search of conflict, that the left can rebuild itself and France calm down?
On the eve of the June elections, the Socialists have a choice.
They can still build alliances that don't offend their history as well as their project.
Amine El Khatmi
The third, finally, relates to a certain conception of the Republic.
The socialist left has always defended universalism whereby the body politic is made up of equal citizens, without distinction of origin, culture, wealth or belonging.
The Republic was based on this philosophy of the addition and the gathering of a people around a common and indivisible base.
La France insoumise by Jean-Luc Mélenchon proceeds by permanent subtraction and confrontation.
Breaking, in a crude clientelist logic, with the secular tradition from which it comes, the movement of Jean-Luc Mélenchon now agitates communitarianism and weakens the common building.
He has, to quote Aimé Césaire,
"a prison vision of identity",
confining the
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It is not even necessary to recall the Poutinian inclinations of Jean-Luc Mélenchon, nor his fascination for the populist dictatorships of Latin America, to understand the gaping fracture which separates the Socialists from the Insoumis.
There is even no need to recall his mistakes during the health crisis, applauding Professor Raoult so as not to despair of La Canebière and demonizing vaccination, to understand where the problem is.
There is no need to imagine alongside which characters the Socialists resign themselves to sitting in the future Assembly.
It is not even necessary to recall the unforgivable compromise that was the participation in a demonstration organized by Islamist movements in November 2019 – a demonstration that the PS had, for once, had the courage to denounce.
It is enough to say, calmly but clearly, that the political project of Jean-Luc Mélenchon, fraught with threats for European cohesion, is the assurance of a weakened and isolated France on the outside, impoverished and divided on the inside.
Is this what François Mitterrand's heirs want?
On the eve of the June elections, the Socialists have a choice.
They can still build alliances that don't offend their history as well as their project.
They can join the women and men of the left who, around the Republican Spring, friends of Olivier Dussopt, François Rebsamen or Jean-Pierre Chevènement have chosen to bring a certain idea of the republican left in the majority of Emmanuel Macron .
They can still decide not to end themselves by receiving Jean-Luc Mélenchon's kiss of death.
Socialists still have the choice not to know "the shame of dying without having fought".