On the evening of Thursday, November 21, after two weeks of political campaigning in the twenty university centers of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, the results of the elections to the central councils were announced. The Raised Fist obtained 15% of the votes cast. More than 1,500 students chose an anti-capitalist and revolutionary list, uncompromising in the face of precariousness, the genocide in Gaza and the fight against the far right. This historic score for the far left in this university allows the Raised Fist to maintain its elected officials in the central councils of the university while doubling its number of voters compared to the last elections of 2022.
To win an unprecedented number of votes for the far left in a university like Paris 1, the activists of Le Poing Levé deployed every day in nearly ten Panthéon-Sorbonne campuses, while actively participating in the mobilization for Palestine in Tolbiac.
“Obtaining 1,500 votes for a revolutionary organization is not trivial at a time when the new ESR Minister Patrick Hetzel is leading an unprecedented repressive offensive against support for Palestine in universities, seeking to silence young people who demand an end to the partnerships of their universities with companies and universities complicit in the genocide” explains Adrien, elected alternate to the Board of Directors. On November 10, Hetzel published an article in Bolloré's JDD calling for more repression against those who dare to vote on motions to break agreements with Israel in the central councils. A few months earlier, he was also the author of an incriminating report against Le Poing Levé and other student organizations in solidarity with the Palestinian people.
It is on this context of offensive against the political opponents of the regime that La Cocarde, a small far-right group candidate in the elections in Paris 1, tried to surf. Fired from the PMF-Tolbiac center last week by the mobilized students against the genocide, the latter had directly called on the government to demand the dissolution of the Le Poing Levé collective, relying on a campaign of fake news relayed by the fascist sphere according to which their activists would have been “attacked with a knife” by students and Le Poing Levé. But this false campaign did not succeed in widely attracting students, despite a particularly reactionary situation conducive to the rise of the far-right on campuses. Indeed, despite a record increase in participation – 25% this year compared to 18% two years ago – La Cockarde received less than 400 votes. For its part, the UNI, Patrick Hetzel's favorite far-right organization, obtained 600 votes.
The Fédé (federation of sector associations), which calls itself “apolitical” but is close to Macronism and as such accompanied the last major attacks against the public university, suffered a clear setback with 1,700 votes against 2,300 two years ago. While the Fédé developed in the 2000s with the objective of depoliticizing the student movement, these scores testify to the growing rejection of corporatism on the part of students and their awareness that their study and living conditions are eminently political fights.
Overall, the Paris 1 elections showed significant politicization by the student left. In total, the five left-wing lists obtained around 7,000 votes in the elections, or two-thirds of the votes cast. More precisely, while the two lists of the UNEF – product of a recent split between the majority branch at the national level and the “Union Renewal” branch – suffered a significant setback in their position by losing nearly 1,000 votes and passing from first organization to third, Le Poing Levé and SAP1, local branch of the Student Union, are the only lists to have progressed compared to 2022.
Thus, the significant progression of SAP1 which takes the place of 1st student organization with more than 3,000 votes, reflects a recomposition of the political forces willing to co-manage the universities with the presidencies and the ministry, while the Student Union has become first organization at CNESER in 2023.
In other words, the collapse of the UNEF in its historic bastion – which had seen the birth of Socialist Party executives like Manuel Valls – follows the national decline of this union, a consequence of the betrayals of Hollande's mandate and its accompanying policies. from the scrapyard of the public university. A turnover in favor of SAP1 which will nevertheless not be without contradictions for a political party claiming to be “localism” and to “independence”in a context of historic attacks to come against higher education.
From this point of view, the Raised Fist score also testifies to the choice of many students to equip themselves with fighting elected officials for the central councils, capable of standing up to the reforms of the presidency and the government, refusing to negotiate regression social. But more broadly, this is also a question of growing support for the university and society project that the Raised Fist defends, as opposed to that of the government and the far right, and which will necessarily be built by putting our energy into mobilization, the streets, and the alliance with workers.
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