The French left was once again shattered by the election of a socialist dissident

The victory of the dissident socialist candidate, elected to parliament in part thanks to the votes of the right, opens a leak in her party’s official strategy in favor of a coalition with other groups of the French left, who thus had to accept electoral failure.

This new dissonance personalizes it Martin Frogerwho won his seat in the second round of by-elections held this Sunday in the department of Ariège, in the Pyrenees, in which he faced Bénédicte Taurine, the official candidate of the Nupes left coalition.

Taurine, who had the support of the leadership of the Socialist Party (PS), as well as La Francia Insumisa (LFI) from Jean-Luc Mélenchonenvironmentalist and communist, who finished in the lead in the first round, ahead of Froger, had to settle for 39.8% of the vote, compared to 60.2% for his rival, according to Eph.

Froger, for her part, was supported by some socialist barons who still did not accept the bet of the first secretary of the PS, Olivier Faure, to join Nupes, controlled by Mélenchon’s LFI. Among them are the president of the Occitania region, Carole Delga; the mayor of Nantes, Nicolas Mayer-Rossignol; the mayor of Paris Anne Hidalgo or the former prime minister Bernard Cazeneuve.

The PS, which unsuccessfully asked Froger not to go to the second round in order to avoid a “duel on the left” that would be decided by the votes of the right and the extreme right, reacted with a harsh statement to the new MP and, above all, to those behind it. “It is a Pyrrhic victory that does not open up any perspective for the left, because it was built on an alliance with the right against the unions of the left and environmentalists,” wrote the formation in their hands Olivier Faure.

“The left,” the note adds, “cannot be more than a united alternative.” According to the socialists, the proof is that it was precisely with this union that it won 150 deputies in the parliamentary elections in June last year and “prevented” French President Emmanuel Macron from getting an absolute majority, and Marine Le Pen’s National Group from achieving the “even more important” parliamentary club.

Mélenchon took to Twitter in an indignant tone to denounce what he described as a “deplorable political montage”. “There you can see what the ‘PS dissidents’ are for. A haven for Le Pen and Macron’s second-round vote to defeat opposition to retirement at age 64.

The left-wing leader thus alluded to Macron’s pension reform, which has already been formally adopted – pending confirmation by the Constitutional Council or not – and plans to postpone the minimum retirement age from 62 to 64, which caused a great social response.