The decision by Solférino and Cambadelis to withdraw the left-wing lists in PACA and the North is not unanimous among left-leaning voters. The comments pouring in on this blog attest to that. I can reveal that last night in Marseille, among my fellow candidates, the mandate was poorly received.
Probably because the majority of us feel that the republican front, which once had legitimacy, now only has the effectiveness of a band-aid on a wooden leg.
Indeed, on Sunday in PACA, for example, one of two things can happen.
Either the right ends up winning, which will be like taking one step back to take two steps forward, considering Nicolas Sarkozy’s statements as he persists in chasing after far-right demagoguery while making the republican left his main target.
Or, as a predictable disaster, the FN wins and thereby legitimizes its “anti-system” discourse in the run-up to the presidential elections.
The moral of the story: whatever Sunday’s outcome, we will find ourselves with one certainty and one probability.
The certainty is the definitive obsolescence of the republican front.
The probability is that the FN will replace the “Republicans” on the right side of the national political stage, akin to the Italian far right filling the void left by the Christian democracy’s ruins.
The only possible remedies: a rise of a truly republican right that would definitively break with Chirac’s ambiguities (the trauma of the post-2002 days is still very present among left-wing voters), and the crypto-FN ideology of Sarkozy-Buisson and a left that, again in the Italian manner (PCI-PDS-PD), would assume its ideological transformation to renew its political offer.
Meanwhile (in the short term), we will have to vote on Sunday. Everyone will do so with a clear conscience but with the feeling that we are witnessing the end of an era.
by Patrick Mottard
