"This debate will not go ahead," announced the boss of the news channel BFM-TV, Marc-Olivier Fogiel, on July 2. France's Prime Minister, Gabriel Attal, the president of the far-right Rassemblement National (RN) party, Jordan Bardella, and the left-wing leader of the Greens, Marine Tondelier, were due to face off on Wednesday, July 3, on the set of the 24-hour news channel.
This is the epilogue to a drama that has been going on since the evening of June 30. A debate between Attal and Bardella was scheduled for Wednesday, between the two rounds of voting in France's snap parliamentary elections. Yet the name of the figure who would represent the Nouveau Front Populaire (NFP), a left-wing alliance made up of the Socialists, the Greens, La France Insoumise (LFI, radical left) and the Communists, in the debate was not settled. Before the first round, Attal and Bardella had already debated on the TF1 and France 2 television channels, first with LFI leader Manuel Bompard, and then with Socialist leader Olivier Faure. Within the left-wing alliance, it had been agreed that each party would take turns debating on TV. In theory, it was Tondelier's turn.
However, Bardella didn't want to face off against Tondelier, who's also a municipal counselor in the northern French town of Hénin-Beaumont, and has long crossed swords with the town's RN mayor, Steeve Briois. Bardella would have preferred to be up against LFI leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon, "the potential prime minister declared by the NUPES," as a source in his entourage put it, pretending to forget that the left-wing alliance had since changed its name to NFP.
Even though all of the NFP leaders have said that Mélenchon would not be prime minister, the RN leader was adamant: He wants Mélenchon. The LFI leader declined and, for the debate, suggested offering the role to one of his lieutenants: The former head of the LFI MPs in the Assemblée Nationale, Mathilde Panot, the party's coordinator, Manuel Bompard, or MP Clémence Guetté. With just four days to go before the second round of the elections, setting up a duel with Mélenchon would have been far from insignificant. Moreover, it was tempting for Bardella to spin the LFI leader into a threat for his own benefit.
The Greens were fuming, suspecting Fogiel of caving to Bardella's whims. At BFM-TV, the channel's branches of the CGT and SNJ labor unions harbored the same suspicion. "Bardella and Attal have no right to decide on the composition of the BFM-TV set," they wrote in a press release issued on Tuesday evening, calling for the much-touted debate between Attal, Bardella and Tondelier to be held.
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