“I am writing to you from the Somme front”: Francois Ruffin wants to install a left-back

Is Francois Ruffin the bad conscience of the French left? In his latest book, the former journalist, who has been a La France insoumise (LFI) deputy in this department since 2017, asks a question that infuriates part of his political camp: why, from election to election, the working classes prefer to abstain. Or vote for the far right rather than the left?

In the presidential elections of April, Jean-Luc Melenchon took the third place (21.9% of votes). After the legislative elections, an agreement between “rebels”, environmentalists, socialists and communists to form a new People’s, Environmental and Social Union (Nupes) allowed the left to gain about 150 seats in the National Assembly. Many wanted to see in these two respectable results, even if they were unexpected a few weeks earlier, a sign of a renewal of the left. Not Francois Ruffin, who bitterly recalls that Marine Le Pen, not content with qualifying for the second round of the presidential election, won 42% of the workers’ vote in the first, more than double her father’s score. (17%) in 1988 in the same social category. And that the National Action (RN) now has 89 deputies at the Palais-Bourbon, a historic record.

France of “yellow vests” and cities

True, the LFI MP does “worship” In his book to Jean-Luc Melenchon, who “showed strength” to the new political generation. He agrees that he was seduced by the line of the “rebel” leader “Popular Areas” and “Green Youth”. But he did not allow the leftists to have a majority in the country, due to the lack of votes France of the “yellow vests”, cities, peripheral France”. why Because in this popular France, which does not live in city centers or on the outskirts of metropolises, but in medium-sized and rural towns, which since the 1980s have experienced the end of industry, the closing of shops and the disappearance. In civil service, left-handedness is seen more as a side of social benefits than a job, Ruffin explains. One door after another, building after pavilion, the little music came back, hauntingly, on “The Helped Ones”“Social occasions” », who “don’t get up in the morning”, WHO “getting help”, but “We have no right to anything”– he says, testifying to his legislative campaign “Between Abbeville and Camon”.