Emphatic, combative and demanding, the style was in full effect in far-left leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s speech to an enthusiastic crowd of thousands celebrating victory in Sunday’s French parliamentary elections.
Standing before supporters in the working-class 20th arrondissement of Paris, Mr. Mélenchon addressed President Emmanuel Macron, and not politely. “The president must resign or appoint one of us as prime minister,” he declared.
Other left-wing leaders have said there should be “discussions” about the future of the country. Not this time. The crowd roared Sunday.
Mr. Mélenchon’s tone and hard line have won him a devoted, youthful following — the only leftist leader with one — and made him both adored and hated, marginalized and central to French politics. More French people have a negative opinion of him, 73 percent, than of Marine Le Pen, the leader of the far-right Rassemblement National. But he also draws large crowds who hang on his every word, as they did on Sunday.
Now he is necessarily at the center of the debate about what lies ahead for France: his brand of leftism or the milder form represented by his critics within the winning left-wing coalition, the New Popular Front. His party, France Unbowed, won the most seats in parliament, 75, in the coalition.
He has said that the person chosen to lead the government should be himself. Unlike other leaders on the left, he has come close to the presidency, nearly making it to the second round two years ago. He told France 5 television on June 22 that he was “very clearly” ready to become prime minister. “I intend to govern this country,” he said.
It is a prospect that even members of Mr. Mélenchon’s coalition, wary of what is seen as his intermittent extremism, have vowed will never happen. “If he really wants to help the New Popular Front, he has to put himself aside,” François Hollande, the mild-mannered former president, a Socialist and now a newly elected deputy, said two weeks ago. “He just has to keep his mouth shut.”
He won’t do that, and that’s both a reason for his support and his biggest problem with the others in the left-wing coalition, which is in danger of breaking up almost immediately, despite Sunday’s narrow victory.
“The problem they will have is that if the president goes looking for a new government, the others will not want Mélenchon,” said Gérard Grunberg, a political scientist and emeritus research director at the National Center for Scientific Research. “He makes a real union of the left impossible. He is very provocative. The left is totally divided.”
France now has no government and it is not clear how it will get one. No party or alliance won a majority in the elections. Despite that fact, Mr. Mélenchon said on Sunday: “We are not going to delete a page or a comma from our program.”
That programme is a redistributive, egalitarian, capitalist, hostile economic vision that is largely inspired by the ideas of Mr Mélenchon. Presidential Platform 2022.
On Sunday, he spoke of the coalition’s economic plans as if he owned them: raising the monthly minimum wage after taxes to 1,600 euros (or about $1,700 from about $1,500) from 1,398 euros — “We will decree it,” Mr. Mélenchon said; freezing the prices of food, energy and fuel; $162 billion in taxes on the rich. Other elements include payments to households for costs related to their children’s education. The right and Mr. Macron have criticized it as adding an unbearable fiscal burden to a country already deeply in debt.
Mr. Mélenchon did not even need to mention another characteristic element of the left-wing platform: “Pension at 60!” the young audience spontaneously began to chant.
It is hard to imagine that Mr. Macron would appoint Mr. Mélenchon as prime minister. They are not fans of each other. Mr. Macron has compared the political movement from the left to the far right Rassemblement National. Mr. Mélenchon is happy to return the compliment.
“Under his leadership, France has become a global example of police brutality and state abuse of power in a regime that is supposed to be democratic,” Mr. Mélenchon wrote of the president in his 2023 book, “We Can Do Better! Toward a Citizens’ Revolution,” which has not been translated.
He fights with the media, targets individual reporters, professes hatred for the United States and love for leftist Latin American dictators whose verbosity he shares. He has praised authoritarian regimes in China, Cuba and Venezuela. “The Yankees represent everything I detest,” he told Le Monde in 2011“A pretentious and arrogant empire, made up of ignorant and pathetic leaders.”
Mr. Mélenchon is a former Trotskyist, a senator for the Paris suburbs and a former minister under the pragmatic socialist prime minister Lionel Jospin. He reads Faulkner but left the socialists in 2008 to form his own party, moving increasingly to the left.
He has refused to condemn Hamas as a terrorist organization, has openly fought with the leaders of Jewish organizations in France and is regularly accused of anti-Semitism, which he denies. Sometimes traffic insinuations these are stereotypes, as for example when he once said that a former Jewish Minister of Economy, Pierre Moscovici, did not “think French” but “think international finance.”
“There is certainly an ambiguity there that promotes anti-Semitism,” said Mr Grunberg.
Patrick Weil, another political scientist, agreed: “There is a limit to Mélenchon. He is seen by a large part of the population as dangerous and anti-Semitic.”
When Mr. Mélenchon said on Sunday that a top priority would be to “recognize the state of Palestine as soon as possible,” the crowd erupted in chants of “Free Palestine.” As at other Mélenchon rallies, kaffiyehs and Palestinian flags were clearly visible.
One of his long lasting heroes is Maximilien Robespierre, the bloodiest of the French revolutionaries, and during the campaign he showed his own authoritarian side, purification of five members of his party France Unbowed, which had often disagreed with him. “Our democracy deserves better than you,” François Ruffin, an independent-minded deputy and party member who was not among the purged, posted on social media.
Yet he has a formula — populist economics to appeal to poor youth, fierce hostility toward Israel to appeal to working-class French Muslims in the suburbs, anti-American and anti-European rhetoric and a pro-immigrant stance — that has proven to be a winner in this election. Many in the crowd cheering him on Sunday were of Arab and African descent. “The French are not a religion, not a skin color,” Mr. Mélenchon said.
He is the rare French politician who speaks approvingly of immigration, using the term “creolization” to describe his country, as he did on Sunday. “That’s very positive,” Mr. Weil said. “He’s integrating young people of North African and African descent into citizenship. He says France has become a melting pot. It’s super important.”
It is one of the many things that has won him supporters. In a preemptive move on Monday, one of the leaders of France Unbowed, Mathilde Panot, told RTL radio that Mr. Mélenchon was “absolutely not disqualified” from becoming prime minister.
His rhetoric on Sunday evening contained echoes of his hero Robespierre, who led the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution.
“The government of the New Popular Front will have no authority other than that which the people gives it,” he said—a sentence that could have been written 230 years ago by Robespierre, a man who incessantly proclaimed that “the people” was the sole source of governmental authority.
“It is not the politics of the past that will continue,” said Mr. Mélenchon, “it is the people who have risen from all the working-class neighborhoods.”
