Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the veteran leftist standing in the way of a Macron-Le Pen rematch

By most accounts, France’s presidential campaign ranks among the most disappointing in recent decades, overshadowed by the horror of the war in Ukraine, hampered by a largely absent incumbent, and tarnished by ramblings far removed from the real concerns of the public.

In the words of Jean Lassalle, the ruralist candidate who once donned a Yellow Vest in parliament, it’s been a “campagne de merde”.

But one man begs to differ. Veteran leftist Jean-Luc Mélenchon has described his third presidential run as the “most thrilling” yet – in part, no doubt, because it has cemented his status as the only powerful voice in a weak and divided left.

“Never before have we had so many critical issues to address,” Mélenchon told reporters in late March, as he prepared to address tens of thousands of supporters in Marseille. “We’re at a historic moment, I hope the French people realise this (…). If other candidates have nothing to say, that’s their problem,” he added. “I have plenty to say.”

Mélenchon’s response to this “historic moment” – most notably his stance on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine – has been the subject of intense scrutiny in the final stretch of the campaign. It has weighed heavily on leftwing voters as they agonise over their choice of ballot in the first round of the election on April 10.

In recent weeks, his rivals on the left have relentlessly targeted the candidate of the Union populaire (Popular Union), accusing him, at best, of complacency towards Russia’s Vladimir Putin. Whether their incessant negative campaigning will damage Mélenchon’s chances, or turn against them, could turn out to be a decisive factor in this election.

Either way, the focus on Mélenchon has bolstered his status as the campaign’s dark horse – and the only candidate with a chance, however slim, of pulling a surprise in an election long billed as a rematch of 2017.

“If I can make it to the second round [on April 24], the election would take on a whole different meaning,” Mélenchon said this week, hoping to sway undecided voters on the centre-left. “After 20 years of sectarian debates on security and immigration, we will finally turn the page.”

A man with a plan

According to his supporters, Mélenchon is not just the only man with a chance; he’s also the only man with a plan.

While his rivals have squandered their time in the spotlight attacking him, Mélenchon has seized on every opportunity to expose his policy platform – a detailed and vastly ambitious plan of action he has been polishing, updating and expanding for much of the past decade, channelling the imput of intellectuals, NGOs and civil society activists.

Of all the candidates’ platforms, Mélenchon’s L’Avenir en commun (Our Common Future) has consistently received the highest grades from advocacy groups, including feminist campaigners, health workers and – damningly for the Greens – climate activists. Even the head of France’s right-leaning business lobby, the Medef, has lauded the programme, suggesting Mélenchon is “ready to govern”, while Macron has praised his concept of long-term environmental planning.

“After years of the left pulling back, fighting a losing battle with neoliberal dogma and the far right,” one can only rejoice at the fact that Mélenchon is scoring points in the battle of ideas, Libération wrote in a column this week.

Jean-Luc Mélenchon sets eyes on France’s election run-off

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The leftist candidate has described his platform as “a global vision for our world, with extremely precise measures to get us there”. He has pushed it with professorial clarity on television sets and with exalted rhetoric before large crowds at campaign rallies.

There are indeed few topics this political omnivore has not touched on during the campaign. He has looked equally at ease discussing digital technologies, ocean pollution, space exploration or animal suffering.

“It’s the magic of politics, you can be interested in all sorts of things,” he told the Journal du Dimanche in mid-March. “Until my last breath, I will be a political activist. I cannot live any other way.”

A life in politics

The passion dates back to Mélenchon’s early childhood in Tangier, on the other side of the Mediterranean, where he was born in 1951 to French-Algerian parents of Spanish origin. He has spoken fondly of the animated political discussions and rallies for Moroccan independence that helped foster a lifelong taste for the rough and tumble of radical politics.

Mélenchon was 11 when the family moved to mainland France, in the eastern Jura region. Like many young leftwingers of his generation, he was drawn to Trotskyist politics during his student years, becoming a leader of the May 68 protests at his local university in Besançon. He got a first job in the press four years later, before starting a 32-year-long association with the Socialist Party in 1976. An admirer of François Mitterrand, who clinched the presidency in 1981, Mélenchon soon rose up the ranks to become France’s youngest senator five years later, aged 35.

Despite the promising start, Mélenchon would spend the next two decades on the party’s fringe, an outspoken and relatively well-known figure who was kept at bay by moderates at the helm. He finally broke with the Socialists in 2008, three years after he defied the party line by campaigning against a draft European constitution that he feared would enshrine neoliberal economics in EU law. The bitter divorce has hampered the French left ever since, resulting in irreconcilable factions that blame each other for wiping out the left.

When he walked out on the Socialists, the left was already a field of ruins, Mélenchon has argued, describing the once mighty party as an empty shell, bereft of ideas. So was the rump of the Communist Party, with which he teamed up in 2012 and 2017, but which is fielding its own candidate this year.

>> Let them eat steak: French Communists bounce back with recipe for ‘happy days’

“We had to start from scratch, without dissociating strategy and programme – whereas with the old left, it was only strategy,” Mélenchon told Libération last week, reflecting on his efforts to build an alternative force on the left. The turning point was “the growing environmental awareness of younger generations, and their radicalisation. I adopted it as the common thread of our ideological renewal”, he said.

“Other parties, including the Greens, failed to grasp the radicalism of this new political ecology. The old left chose not to embrace it, hoping it would go away quietly, but we made the opposite choice,” Mélenchon added. “We are the youngest political force on the left and yet we are the largest, the better organised, the most coherent.”

On the campaign trail, Mélenchon has repeatedly said he was haunted by the vanishing of Italy’s Communist-led left wing, “long Europe’s most intelligent and creative”. During a two-hour address in Toulouse on Sunday, he recalled his fear that “France’s radical humanist tradition” would go the same way. Instead, he told the crowd of 20,000 crammed into the city’s main square, “our mission is accomplished, the strength is here, you are the living proof”.

Chasing Le Pen

Mélenchon has enjoyed less success with his other stated mission: to reach out to working-class voters who were once solidly left-wing, and lure them back from the far right. According to a study by the Fondation Jean Jaurès published earlier this week, the share of blue-collar workers and employees who plan to back the leftist candidate has shrunk, relative to other professions since 2017. “The Mélenchon vote is neither a class-based vote nor a working-class vote,” the study argued.

After his rally in Marseille last month, Mélenchon spoke candidly to reporters about his chances in the upcoming presidential contest. “Either the quartiers populaires vote in droves on April 10, or I’m a dead man,” he sighed, referring to the working-class suburbs of Paris and other French cities, where many tend to shun the polls. Turning to the principal obstacle standing in his way, he added: “I don’t understand how Marine Le Pen can keep rising in the polls without even campaigning, whereas we have to chase down each vote with our teeth.”

The upcoming presidential contest marks the third time Mélenchon and Le Pen are vying for the elusive vote populaire. As in the past two elections, the leader of the far-right National Rally has enjoyed a comfortable headstart over her left-wing rival in what has always been a lop-sided contest. Polls suggest she is 3% to 7% ahead of third-placed Mélenchon, meaning she is likely to qualify for the all-important run-off on April 24.

>> Read more: Could Le Pen’s blandest campaign be her most successful yet?

While both Mélenchon and Le Pen have put purchasing power at the heart of their platforms, the latter’s pitch is likely to appeal more directly to low-income voters, said Cécile Alduy, a professor at Stanford University, noting that: “Mélenchon’s discourse is more political and ideological, whereas Le Pen talks about prices in supermarkets, fuel costs for fishermen and keeping people’s homes warm, all the while campaigning on the ground.”

On paper, the narrowing gap in second-round surveys suggests Le Pen is also more likely to benefit from the “anyone but Macron” vote than Mélenchon, who is seen as a longer shot to defeat the incumbent. Le Pen’s camp has been eagerly sharing the latest polls, hoping widespread voter anger can propel her to an unlikely victory over Macron.

A new Republic

Discontent with France’s self-styled “Jupiterian” president has highlighted one aspect of Mélenchon’s platform that allows him to reach beyond his core support: the promise to quash the presidential regime instituted by General Charles de Gaulle, France’s wartime hero, more than 60 years ago, and put power “back into the people’s hands”.

“Over the past five years, Emmanuel Macron has aggravated every aspect of the solitary power fostered by the Fifth Republic,” says the leftist candidate’s online platform. “His predecessors were presidential monarchs; he has become an absolutist presidential monarch.”

Mélenchon’s proposals for a Sixth Republic include introducing proportional representation to make parliament more representative; giving citizens the power to initiate legislation and referendums, and to revoke their representatives; and scrapping special powers that currently give France’s executive right to pass legislation without parliamentary approval.

But those are just proposals. The Union populaire candidate says it will be up to the people to decide on their next constitution. Never one to miss a revolutionary reference, he has promised to convene a constituent assembly whose members will be either elected or drawn by lots. Their draft constitution will then be submitted to the people via referendum.

>> Read more: Leftist Mélenchon promises to topple France’s ‘presidential monarchy’

Ironically, Mélenchon is, in many ways, the quintessential Fifth Republic politician: egocentric, domineering, temperamental, without the veneer of sophistication and politeness that allows his rivals to get away with the very same traits. But his promise of a new Republic has enabed him to lure voters allergic to his personality – people like 32-year-old dance teacher Hélène Lallemand, who quipped at a rally for the Sixth Republic in March that she showed up “despite Mélenchon, rather than because of him”.

Though no fan of the firebrand leftist, Lallemand praised his idea of convening a constituent assembly to draw up a new constitution – “by and for the people” – and giving voters the power to revoke their representatives. She said such moves were urgently needed to offset “the mounting voter apathy and disillusion that are sapping French democracy”.

“It is up to the people to write their constitution, not a cabinet of experts,” Mélenchon roared moments later as he addressed the crowd, promising to “breathe new life into a country that is dying a slow death through abstention”.

‘Non-aligned’

The promise has allowed Mélenchon to lure some of Macron’s best-known foes: the Yellow Vest protesters that at one point looked capable of bringing his presidency to a premature end.

“There were two main requirements for our choice of candidate: to carry our aspirations and have a chance of beating Macron. Mélenchon is the only one who meets both,” said Sabine, a primary school teacher from the Montpellier area who has donned the Gilet jaune since Novembre 2018. She pointed to Mélenchon’s pledges to impose a cap on prices, boost wages, bolster public services and replace France’s “presidential monarchy”.

“Mélenchon is not our ideal candidate, he’s not to everyone’s taste and we are well aware that there’s no easy fix,” she said. “But he’s our best option. We’re at a crossroads: either we change course now or we let those in power dismantle our social system.”

Like Le Pen, Mélenchon has been cautious in his appeals to the Yellow Vest electorate, wary of scaring away more moderate voters, said Frédéric Gonthier, a political scientist at the Pacte research centre in Grenoble. “For candidates who are trying to project an image of respectability, overtly anti-elitist statements aimed at seducing the Yellow Vests would be counterproductive,” he said.

Mélenchon has been at pains to reassure centre-left voters tempted to vote for the Green’s Yannick Jadot or the Socialist candidate Anne Hidalgo. He has refrained from attacking his rivals even as they branded him unfit to rule. He has also strived to remain calm and composed, hoping to erase memories of his infamous 2018 outburst, when he pushed aside a police officer who was searching his party’s premises, and shouted: “I am the Republic!”  

As war continues to rage in Ukraine, much will depend on those voters’ willingness to cast aside their misgivings about Mélenchon’s stance on NATO – the legacy of a lifelong hostility to American interventionism on the international stage.

>> Ukraine war puts France’s NATO-sceptic presidential candidates in a tight spot

In a chapter devoted to the subject of “Peace”, his policy platform describes the transatlantic alliance as “an instrument to make countries subservient to the United States”, calling NATO an “archaic” institution that “should have been dissolved at the end of the Cold War”. “Instead, it has only extended its reach with nefarious consequences for peace and our security.”

Only a week before the launch of Russia’s full-scale invasion, Mélenchon pleaded for France’s “non-alignment” in the Ukrainian standoff, writing on Twitter: “The Russians must not cross Ukraine’s borders, which must be respected, and the Americans must not annex Ukraine into NATO.” He has stuck to this line of thinking even as Russian forces continue to pound Ukraine, rejecting talk of a volte-face.

“Our condemnation of Russia’s military intervention does not mean we have shifted our stance, on the contrary,” he told reporters at the start of the war. “I have always said that we cannot continue to humiliate Russia by pushing NATO ever closer to its borders. It’s a danger they’ll never accept.”