FRANCAISSecours populaire français - Comments
3) Links to politics
-During the cold war, the SPF favoured countries from the Eastern block and so-called progressive regimes (Nicaragua, Vietnam, Romania, Cuba). The organisation only defended political prisoners in the “imperialist” camp, and not in the Soviet one. Article 2 of the Constitution of the Secours populaire de France et des colonies clearly limited moral and material support to “victims of fascism and nazism”. However, since the Berlin Wall came down, SPF operations abroad have changed a lot. Now, the SPF also supports the Chechens victimised by the Russian army. Moreover, it does not take openly political positions about the events that justify its humanitarian actions, as it wants to have an influence on the consequences, not on the causes. The SPF does not wish to get into ideological struggles, that is why it advises its structures not to get associated with political calls, for instance in the French NGOs collective body for Palestine, where it only has an observer status.
-At the beginning, the SPF had many communist and socialist members, as well as committed priests. Julien Laupêtre, the president of the SPF, joined the central committee of the French communist party in 1964. Menotti Bottazi, who was in charge of SPF’s international operations, ran as a socialist in the 1983 local elections. Still today, the charity has links with the communist newspaper L’Humanité which, in 1992, started giving the SPF its profits on the sale of a special Sunday issue. Nevertheless, the grassroots of the organisation have considerably widened. Now the SPF welcomes volunteers from very different geographical, professional and religious backgrounds, representing a great variety of opinions.
