Despite a deceptive victory in the 2nd round of the parliamentary elections, the campaign of the New Popular Front (NFP) was undermined by the excesses of Mélenchonism – a veritable scarecrow capable of scaring off secularists, universalists and social democrats – and weighed down by the purge carried out within LFI against dissident MPs who dared to challenge Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s divisive strategy.
This is a logbook of an election campaign consumed by the divisions and infighting that prevented the NFP from obtaining an absolute majority, despite the impressive momentum generated by the hope of a united left capable of forming the basis of a republican alternative to the perils of the far right…
The world of yesterday described by Stefan Zweig in his Brazilian exile in 1943 has never been so close to us. His lament as a European, contemporaneous with the swallowing up of everything he loved, continues to haunt us as a new Europe and a new France emerge from the ballot boxes on 9 June, and then, in our country, from those on 30 June and 7 July. The crisis campaign preceding the European elections was marked by the disappearance of the key principles on which our civilisation is founded: courteous confrontation, rationality versus delusion, the search for meaning versus the senseless and the unthought-of.
