The chess game continues. Today, it is the MEP Raphaël GlucksmannMEP from the center-left party Public placewho announces that he will run again in the European elections in June 2024. In an interview given to The Obs, the 43-year-old essayist says: “I am a candidate. » He evokes in particular “a moment of change, shaken by the war, confronted with the climate crisis and obliged to question the deregulated globalization which weakens it”.
Is he thinking of leading a public square gathering list and the Socialist Party, with whom he has been sitting for five years, as in 2019? “It would seem natural to me to leave together and I think that this also corresponds to the desire of socialist activists. I am convinced that we will carry a list gathering around a clear, pro-European, social-democrat and environmentalist line, but I obviously leave the socialists their own agenda and their own tempo,” he responds in the columns of the weekly. .
“Obvious affinities”
Socialist activists must decide at the beginning of October for or against an autonomous PS list. But the question of the head of the list, the composition of this list and any possible alliances has not yet been submitted to the vote of activists. Within the PS, many agree that he would be “a good candidate”, who “has managed to be identified on the subjects he defends” at the European level, such as the cause of the Uighurs or Ukraine. . The management specifies that the PS has “its timetable”, and that the question of the head of the list is not yet under discussion. At the end of August, during the summer days, she indicated that it was first necessary to discuss “the line”, while evoking “obvious affinities” with Raphaël Glucksmann.
At the time champion of the union of the lefts for Europeans, of which the creation of Place publique was intended to be the translation, Glucksmann today recalls the existence of “substantial oppositions” with the communists and the rebels, on the question of Ukraine and European Defense. “Let’s take responsibility for them,” he proclaims, refusing to present in this one-round proportional ballot a “united left” which would do “at the same time”. “For the European Union but not too much, for Ukraine but not too much,” he quipped to better oppose this hypothesis.
“Caricatured divergences”
Despite calls for unity from La France insoumise, the Nupes parties are dispersed to the Europeans, each presenting their own list. “This announcement of candidacy further adds to the disunity by artificially highlighting caricatured differences,” regretted to AFP the rebellious MEP Manon Aubry. “82% of left-wing voters ask us to stop the shopkeeper quarrels: it is time to listen to them,” she added, in reference to an Elabe poll last June according to which more than four voters for Jean-Luc Mélenchon of 2022 out of five would vote for a single Nupes list.
Head of the list with the PS in 2019, Raphaël Glucksmann received 6.19% of the vote. On this point, he claims to have “learned the lessons” of 2019 and prefers to campaign than “spend (his) time in dark rooms discussing endlessly with political apparatuses”.
Finally, he took the opportunity to shoot his arrows at the Macronist group in the European Parliament which, according to him, “persists in the social and ecological impe of productivist agriculture through the continuation of a common agricultural policy favoring the largest farmers and agro-industry giants.