It is now obvious, the war in Ukraine has provided the left with a new opportunity to mark its differences. Jean-Luc Mélenchon on one side, Yannick Jadot and Anne Hidalgo on the other. In the demonstrations of support for the Ukrainian people, everyone marches on their side. If Olivier Faure, Raphaël Glucksmann, Yannick Jadot and Christiane Taubira have been immortalized side by side, the deputies of La France insoumise avoid taking family photos. “What bullshit the war! » : for his big Parisian meeting, Thursday March 10, Fabien Roussel chose the words of Prévert to also hammer out messages of peace, calling for “put aside quarrels” to demand a ceasefire in Ukraine. But the left is far from agreeing on the means of making peace, it even disputes the pacifist heritage.
MEP Raphaël Glucksmann wondered, on March 6, on France 5: “We can all be for peace, but how do we get to peace, and what is peace? To refuse to give the Ukrainian resistance the means to defend itself is not to be a pacifist, it is to let those who make the war win it. » “Munich” – in reference to the Munich agreements of 1938, signed by France and the United Kingdom with Nazi Germany and Mussolini’s Italy to avoid war but which resulted in the annexation of the Sudetenland by Hitler and the dismantling of Czechoslovakia – the adjective was quickly dropped in the camp of Yannick Jadot to qualify the positioning of Jean-Luc Mélenchon. “Go to war”replied the latter, for whom delivering arms to Ukraine means risking warfare.
Everyone is also fighting over the legacy of Jean Jaurès, a pacifist assassinated on the eve of the First World War. In invectives which culminated this week, the day following the meeting ” for peace “ by Jean-Luc Mélenchon, on Sunday, where he reiterated his desire to leave NATO and his preference for national sovereignty over the idea of European defence. “All his grand speeches on peace mask his complacency and capitulation to Putinreacted Yannick Jadot, on Sud Radio. Can you imagine Jean Jaurès defending the bombardments of civilian populations in Syria? » A reference to the sentence of Jean-Luc Mélenchon who still recently estimated that Vladimir Poutine had “solved the problem in Syria”.
To each his own Jaurès
“The reference to Jaurès is almost a chestnut treenotes historian Roger Martelli. It has always been ambiguous, Jaurès is the one, in the communist reading, who died because he was a pacifist and would never have accepted that the left sank into the sacred union at the outbreak of the First World War. On the socialist side, it was Jaurès, a man of peace but also of the new army, who would have accepted participation in the sacred union. »
You have 45.06% of this article left to read. The following is for subscribers only.
