Bernard Cazeneuve at the National Congress of the Radical Left Party last March in Labège. MATTHEW RONDEL/AFP
COUNTERPOINT – In view of the presidential election of 2027, Bernard Cazeneuve, opposed to the Nupes alliance, intends to revive French social democracy.
It is by reading The Knot of Vipers that Bernard Cazeneuve discovered François Mauriac, on whom he has just written a very personal book. And it is by seeing the knot of vipers of the left shaped by Jean-Luc Mélenchon that the former Prime Minister intends to revive French social democracy. Fascinated by “the darkness of feelingsof the Mauritian heroes, he is revolted by the blackness of the resentment of the Nupesian herald. Formerly elected from Cherbourg, Cazeneuve returns in his own way, “pionately moderate», a quality that Tocqueville recognized in the people of La Manche. It is its originality and its limit as the future of the left is as much a matter of ideological line as of personal equation.
The starting point is clear. As Francois Hollandelike Nicolas Mayer-Rossignol, Michaël Delafosse or Anne Hidalgo, the mayors of Rouen, Montpellier and Paris, like Carole Delga or Loïg Chesnais-Girard, the bosses of the Occitanie and Brittany regions, the former head of government refuses a left…