France’s hard-left leader is escaping proper scrutiny
Macron? Household name in the UK. Le Pen? Well known. Mélenchon? Not so much. And yet Jean-Luc Mélenchon heads the New Popular Front alliance of left-wing parties which came second in last week’s first round of the French parliamentary elections with a 28% share of the vote. Support for the alliance is growing as rapidly as that of Marine Le Pen’s National Rally (NR).
The foreign media’s fixation on the rivalry between Le Pen and Macron for the French presidency has resulted in far less scrutiny of Melenchon and his hard left France Unbowed party. He has some interesting views, and a volatile personality.
There is snobbism and temper tantrums, the latter earned him a 3-month suspended prison term in 2019. Prosecutors had authorised searches of his party offices and home over fake jobs allegation. A red faced incandescent Mélenchon was filmed pushing a police officer and bellowing at him “I am the Republic”. You might think “L‘État, c’est moi” was a little pompous when Louis XIV allegedly said it, but Melenchon took le biscuit.
Perhaps he was defending the honour of the Republic, but there seems to be no defence of his attempt to humiliate a journalist who asked him a question with a regional accent. He pretended not to understand and said, “does anybody have a question in French?. He has an authoritarian streak which has alienated both staff and potential allies.
As for politics, Mélenchon still rates Castro, Chavez, and any other passing anti-imperialist Latin American strongman. In 2016, he supported Russia’s intervention in Syria because Vladimir Putin “was going to sort out the problem”. In 2021, China thanked him for “his constant support of the one-China policy” re Taiwan. During the nationwide riots last year, which followed the police killing of a 17-year boy, he refused to call for calm After the Oct 7 massacres in Israel, he lashed out at a rival left-wing leader for supporting a European Parliament resolution condemning the attacks.
He has form when to comes to Jews going back to at least 2013 when he accused the economics minister Pierre Moscovici of not “thinking French,” but “international finance.” When informed of the classic antisemitic tropes about international finance and Jewish bankers, he professed astonishment and said he had no idea Moscovici was Jewish.
Several years later, asked about police anti-riot tactics he suddenly brought up allegations of deicide. The police should not react he said then added, “I don’t know if Jesus was on a cross, but he was apparently put there by his own people.”
As for Jeremy Corbyn’s election loss in 2019 – it was, he said, linked to the influence of the Israeli Likud party. There’s more. So much more that an IFOP survey of French Jews last month had some startling findings; 96% of those surveyed said France Unbowed was the leading party promoting antisemitism, followed by the Greens with 60%n and RN third at 49%.
Mélenchon was born in Tangier (French-controlled Morocco) in 1951 but moved to France in 1962. In his twenties, he was a Trotskyist but joined the Socialists in 1976. He had a brief period as a junior minister in 2000 but left the party in 2008. In 2016, he founded France Unbowed just in time to see the collapse of the Socialists in the presidential election the following year.
He is a charismatic speaker, and his rhetoric has attracted both attention and support, increasingly among young voters. However, since the dramatic shrinking of the Socialists, his party, and others from the fractured left wing, have struggled to seriously challenge the dominance of Macron’s Renaissance movement or Le Pen’s RN. That changed when rivals on the left such as the Communist Paarty saw him as the only chance to form a majority in the National Assembly and allowed him to lead a “Popular Front” for this election in which it fielded a single “unity” candidate in the 577 constituencies.
It is doubtful it will be enough, and in the unlikely event that it was, it’s doubtful Melenchon would become Prime Minister as his coalition partners roundly dislike him.
The tradition in France is that if the hard right look like getting into power after the first round of voting, then the centre and left cooperate in the second round to prevent it. The top two candidates in the first round go thorough to the second, along with anyone who won more than 12.5%. In recent years, the centre and left have agreed that a candidate in a three-way fight would stand down to unite the anti-hard right vote.
However, this year not everyone has agreed to stand down due to their views on Melenchon. Also, the anti-right vote may be weaker. A lot of hard left voters have in the past voted for the RN. Where a Macron candidate is standing, it’s unclear if they will vote that way.
After last week’s results, some left-wing supporters, angered at Le Pen’s first place, took to the street, setting fires, smashing windows and launching fireworks. At a march in Nantes this week, some demonstrators had signs reading: “what we don’t get through the ballot box, we’ll get through the streets”. Melenchon is not known for his calming effects in such circumstances.
The National Assembly, sitting in the Palais Bourbon across the river from the Place de la Concorde, was founded in 1798. It’s internal design divided parties, they would sit to the right or left of the dais, with the centre reserved for the government. Hence left wing/right wing.
It’s getting increasingly difficult to tell sections of them apart. In 2017, Mélenchon said the French Republic had no guilt when it came to the Holocaust despite the rounding up of Jews being overseen by the Vichy government. For this, he was condemned. Three months earlier, Marine Le Pen had said the same thing.
The tradition in France is that if the hard right look like getting into power after the first round of voting, then the centre and left cooperate in the second round to prevent it. The top two candidates in the first round go thorough to the second, along with anyone who won more than 12.5%. In recent years, the centre and left have agreed that a candidate in a three-way fight would stand down to unite the anti-hard right vote.
However, this year not everyone has agreed to stand down due to their views on Melenchon. Also, the anti-right vote may be weaker. A lot of hard left voters have in the past voted for the RN. Where a Macron candidate is standing, it’s unclear if they will vote that way.
After last week’s results, some left-wing supporters, angered at Le Pen’s first place, took to the street, setting fires, smashing windows and launching fireworks. At a march in Nantes this week, some demonstrators had signs reading: “What we don’t get through the ballot box, we’ll get through the streets”. Mélenchon is not known for his calming effects in such circumstances.
The National Assembly, sitting in the Palais Bourbon across the river from the Place de la Concorde, was founded in 1798. It’s internal design divided parties, they would sit to the right or left of the dais, with the centre reserved for the government. Hence left wing/right wing.
It’s getting increasingly difficult to tell sections of them apart. In 2017, Mélenchon said the French Republic had no guilt when it came to the Holocaust despite the rounding up of Jews being overseen by the Vichy government. For this, he was condemned. Three months earlier, Marine Le Pen had said the same thing.
The tradition in France is that if the hard right look like getting into power after the first round of voting, then the centre and left cooperate in the second round to prevent it. The top two candidates in the first round go thorough to the second, along with anyone who won more than 12.5%. In recent years, the centre and left have agreed that a candidate in a three-way fight would stand down to unite the anti-hard right vote.
However, this year not everyone has agreed to stand down due to their views on Mélenchon. Also, the anti-right vote may be weaker. A lot of hard left voters have in the past voted for the RN. Where a Macron candidate is standing, it’s unclear if they will vote that way.
After last week’s results, some left-wing supporters, angered at Le Pen’s first place, took to the street, setting fires, smashing windows and launching fireworks. At a march in Nantes this week, some demonstrators had signs reading: “what we don’t get through the ballot box, we’ll get through the streets”. Mélenchon is not known for his calming effects in such circumstances.
The National Assembly, sitting in the Palais Bourbon across the river from the Place de la Concorde, was founded in 1798. It’s internal design divided parties, they would sit to the right or left of the dais, with the centre reserved for the government. Hence left wing/right wing.
It’s getting increasingly difficult to tell sections of them apart. In 2017, Mélenchon said the French Republic had no guilt when it came to the Holocaust despite the rounding up of Jews being overseen by the Vichy government. For this, he was condemned. Three months earlier, Marine Le Pen had said the same thing.
They agree on other things as well. This quote is from one of them, but they’ve both said it in different ways: “People have understood here that to improve their lives, they need to change everything.”
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