After an election campaign concluded with a dismal result, the socialists break their silence to shape their future.
Xavier Garcia is reviving the left-wing union, as he had ardently proposed during this regional election, receiving in response a refusal from the ecologists and the radical left who positioned themselves as rivals with the aim of taking the lead on the left.
The failure of this ambition might advise these intellectual acrobats to shift their focus from an abstract notion to the very concrete problem of an election: preventing voters from saying “we cannot vote for this mediocrity.”
Xavier Garcia’s initiative is commendable, but to achieve success, it must dissipate the thick smoke of opposition from the radical left to the government’s policies.
However, it is not enough to restore a central place for the increasingly marginalized socialists in the local and now regional political landscape.
The party must be rebuilt around a new leadership class: too many defeats have dented the standing elites as well as their image. In today’s media-driven democracy, they lose credibility.
As Ladislas Polski, president of MRC06 and a faithful ally of the socialists, aptly stated: “The left must rebuild itself thoroughly if it wants to embody hope for the popular classes that have slipped away because it has not sufficiently addressed the French people’s feeling of economic and cultural insecurity.”
That said, one can only encourage the unique combativeness of these young forty-somethings tasked with the not-so-simple challenge of reviving a moribund party to propel it towards the next electoral battles.
Statement by Xavier Garcia (First Federal Secretary PS06)
At the end of these regional elections, the regret of not being able to defend our chances to the end is still very strong, but it is alleviated by the relief of not becoming the first region led by the National Front.
This republican barrier against the far-right was made possible by an exemplary mobilization of left-wing voters, which was not evident and gave full meaning to the sacrifice of Christophe Castaner and his running mates.
After such a trauma, we have incurred a debt to the people of the left in Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur. Our duty now is to never again confront them with such a dilemma. This will necessarily require the unity of left-wing forces from the first round in the future.
To say this is not a decree or an attempt to shirk responsibility, it is a cold and relentless assessment that the political situation in our region imposes on us, particularly in our department, with a dominant right and an FN in constant progression.
I have already proposed setting up a departmental left liaison committee that would bring together all left-wing formations and establish a permanent dialogue among us.
This dialogue is now a matter of survival, and for my part, I will never resign myself to a local political life summed up as a dialogue between the right and the far-right. Fatalism does not exist in politics, provided we give ourselves the means to rise after a failure.
