This Friday morning, socialist activists wake up with… two First Secretaries.
After the vote on Thursday of some 20,000 members within the framework of the 80th Congress of the PS, the party with the rose finds itself in an ubiquitous and inextricable situation which is not unlike that of the fratricidal congress of 2008 which had opposed Ségolène Royal to Martine Aubrey.
At 1:20 a.m. on Friday, outgoing First Secretary Olivier Faure claimed victory in a video posted on YouTube, saying that the activists "expressed this evening, by a clear vote, their desire to continue the rally of the left and environmentalists by renewing their confidence and ensuring that I am once again the leader of this great political party".
🔴 Let's meet live following the vote of the 80th congress of the @partisocialiste.#CongresPS https://t.co/DAsfpx5HKl
— Olivier Faure (@faureolivier) January 20, 2023
Twenty minutes later, his rival, the mayor of Rouen Nicolas Mayer-Rossignol imitates him in a tweet saying that the PS "comrades" have placed him "at the top of the ballot".
The apotheosis of a crazy evening punctuated by online press briefings from both sides against a backdrop of ultra-tight results and mutual accusations of irregularities.
Dear comrades,
You have trusted us by placing us at the top of the ballot.
From tomorrow I will work, with all the socialists, to bring together and renew our political family.
pic.twitter.com/O2tXIcTa5E
— Nicolas Mayer-Rossignol (@NicolasMayerNMR) January 20, 2023
When Olivier Faure takes the floor, Nicolas Mayer-Rossignol is still explaining to journalists that he "won the ballot up to 53% on the basis of 90% of the stripped".
Admittedly, the results of the federations of Guadeloupe, Bouches-du-Rhône and Essonne, very favorable to Olivier Faure, have not yet fallen at this time, but the elected Norman ensures that even if his rival is full in these three departments, he would still win with 50.5% of the vote in the worst case.
An “unacceptable attempt at destabilization”
Except that a few minutes earlier, Pierre Jouvet, spokesperson for the PS and representative of Olivier Faure, had assured the opposite.
"Given the results, we can tell you with certainty that there is no possibility for Nicolas Mayer-Rossignol to catch up" insists the socialist executive, who then does not hide his anger denouncing an "attempt to destabilize unacceptable” from the mayor of Rouen who had already claimed victory a few minutes earlier.
"They won't steal the PS Congress from the militants" enrages Pierre Jouvet, warning the Congress finalist.
“He would do well to find his way back to sanity as soon as possible.”
A battle of numbers therefore begins as in the first vote last Thursday where Faure's orientation text came first (49.15%) ahead of those of Mayer-Rossignol (30.51%) and Hélène Geoffrey (20.54%).
On the night of Thursday to this Friday, a relative of Olivier Faure estimated that the outgoing First Secretary would finish around 51% and explained why the outgoing boss of the PS had claimed victory before the arrival of the final results.
"The Mayer-Rossignol camp was putting such pressure that we had to whistle the end of the game," he confided, adding that contacts were going to be made "with Mayer-Rossignol to see if he manages to come down or he wants to continue to do Trump or Bolsonaro”.
Around 2 a.m., in a press release, the Mayer-Rossignol team asked that the party authorities meet "to find a solution from above" deploring that Olivier Faure declared his victory "without any planned authority which has the responsible for announcing the results.
The coming hours therefore promise to be extremely tense between the two suitors.
Numerous appeals and suspicions of irregularities
As if that were not enough, the verification commission which will be in charge of validating the results in the next few hours will have to examine numerous appeals and suspicions of irregularities of which the two camps accuse each other.
Supporting video, Nicolas Mayer-Rossignol thus requests “the cancellation of a certain number of results”.
Like that of the section of Liévin (Pas-de-Calais), 300 voters, where according to him, "the tellers were taken out of the room by the municipal police".
The same denounces “doubtful” situations in sections of Seine-Saint-Denis, a department favorable to the outgoing First Secretary.
But on the side of Olivier Faure, there are also irregularities with his opponent, in particular in Seine-Maritime, stronghold of Mayer-Rossignol, where a complaint was filed in Mont-Saint-Aignan after death threats made against a scrutineer , who had to appear accompanied by a bailiff at the polling station.
The management was also moved, still in Seine-Maritime, by the aggression and death threats against five young scrutineers who came to watch the vote in Elbeuf.
A polling station where a bailiff had already been dispatched last week after suspicions of irregularities.
“No one can draw conclusions at this stage,” nevertheless acknowledged PS number 2 Corinne Narassiguin.
It is therefore deeply divided and torn socialists who will meet at the end of next week in Marseilles where the winner of the Congress will be officially enthroned.
It is still necessary that they manage by then to agree on the name of their future First Secretary.
