Por Eve Ottenberg
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| Photograph Source: Thomas Delplace – CC0 |
Jean Luc Melenchon is doing well with French voters, while his chief rival, arch-rightist Marine LePen, is not. White-bread centrist president Emmanuel Macron is term-limited and so, thank God, cannot run again. The path for Melenchon and his party, La France Insoumise (France Unbowed) should be clear; if for any reason it isn’t, that – and it would not be the first time – would be suspicious.
In 2024 Melenchon’s party within the “far-left” New Popular Front won the most seats in parliament, costing Macron his majority. Had he followed precedent and tradition, Macron would have picked a prime minister from the New Popular Front or La France Insoumise. But the French president’s reaction appeared to be, “Horrors! Anything but that!” So per Google, Macron broke with the past. He picked someone deeply unpopular, Michel Barnier, from the right-wing party, Les Republicans. Barnier had to resign in December 2024. Suffice it to say, this move did not endear Macron to the French. In fact, one might conclude that Macron’s allergy to the winning parliamentary party cost him the sliver of popularity he did cling to and indeed, politically backfired.
Melenchon will run for president in 2027 for the fourth time, aiming to address the economic crisis and opposing foreign atrocities like the Gaza genocide. Routinely described in corporate media as “hard left,” Melenchon is an anti-capitalist regularly tarred by publications like Politico (May 6) as divisive and his comments even “deemed by some as antisemitic.” Clearly Politico would prefer the more-likely-to compromise Green or Socialist candidates, but those parties – happily for the ordinary people who support Melenchon – are in disarray, so their followers could well vote La France Insoumise. The May 6 Politico article speaks deprecatingly of his party as “a well-oiled machine built largely for Melenchon’s presidential ambitions.” Or, maybe more forthrightly, it’s an effective old-left movement that, shockingly to outlets like Politico, might actually win.
What kind of president would Melenchon be? Well, here’s a tiny sample of his recent tweets. “In May, 6 femicides in 9 days. 36 since the start of the year. And what? Nothing? What kind of society are we? Why does nothing happen?” And from May 8: “The National Rally [far-right] is our main adversary. This party of incompetents would turn France into an ethnonationalist nation eaten away by racism. In the second round, Marine Le Pen prefers a candidate from the ‘central bloc’ facing her: they spout rhetoric just as terrifying as hers. And she would beat them, because voters prefer the original to the copy.”
Other tweets decry astronomical fuel prices, the French colonial mentality vis a vis Algeria, the brutal Israeli invasion of Lebanon, promise – at long last – to remove France from NATO, call it “a disgrace that France did not give the Lebanese the means to form an army to protect the borders,” and insist that “we have a vested interest in bringing the Russians back to the European side.”
This last remark about the Russians Melenchon links to Ukrainian nuclear power plants and the chance that any trouble with them, i.e. radioactive meltdowns, would adversely impact “the entire Mediterranean and its 500 million surrounding residents,” That’s putting it mildly. Melenchon does not specify who might be responsible for the possible bombings that could cause such catastrophic meltdowns, but it’s worth nothing that thus far in this Ukraine War, Kiev has consistently made the nonsensical claim that Moscow is bombing itself, to wit, the nuclear power plants in Ukraine that it controls. And if you believe that, I have nothing further to say to you.
So Melenchon offers a mix of old and new left solutions to persistent problems; in other words, he apparently wants to do what works and is not hidebound by ideology or dogmatism, as the centrist press likes to imply, with its use of what it evidently hopes is the scarifying term “hard-left.” Well, ever since the yellow-vest uprising, France has cast around for someone not of the center. How Macron won as he did is a mystery, maybe even legitimate fodder for a conspiracy theory. But as Melenchon noted, the center is really but a copy of the far-right. And La France Insoumise is the only party offering something different. But expect an attack of the vapors in European Union leadership if Melenchon actually wins. He is the EU’s worst nightmare, and everyone remembers how this gang of unelected European bosses reacts to nightmares or even just to bad dreams. How do we remember? From what the EU did to Greece when it had the temerity to elect a left-wing government in 2015. The EU, led by Germany, crushed the Greek government, the ruling political party Syriza, and, along the way, the Greek people and to a certain extent, democracy in Europe.
But the battle isn’t over, as partisan journalist Thomas Fazi steadily reports. He and Melenchon would doubtless agree not only on France withdrawing from NATO, but also, most likely, on France’s place in what Fazi called in a September 3, 2025 substack article, “the censorship industrial complex,” and on Macron’s role in it, particularly his “persistent urge to cultivate direct ties with the CEOs of major digital platforms. He notably granted French citizenship to Evan Spiegel, CEO of Snapchat, and to Pavel Durow, CEO of Telegram – now facing indictment in France on multiple serious charges. Macron has also held several meetings at the Elysee Palace with Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and head of Meta.”
Fazi argues – as AI (I’m sure he’d be interested ) summarizes this reporter’s extensive work – that Macron managed to marginalize “the left while absorbing the National Rally into the mainstream,” and the consequences of this centrist manipulation throughout Europe – consider how successive supposedly middle-of-the-road German governments have catapulted the possibly fascist Alternative fur Deutschland’s popularity through the roof – are dire. They especially impact Melenchon, regarded by both the right and the faux center as an existential threat. And with the at least post-2025 new relationship to political speech on social media of Macron and the class he represents, how La France Insoumise responds to its inevitable caricatures in the news will be consequential. Hopefully Melenchon will not take cover in identity politics platitudes – though a bit of this may be necessary – because while it will gain votes in one corner, it will lose them in another, namely, those multitudes of formerly yellow vest protestors.
Not that this seems like a danger Melenchon can’t navigate. He is 74, has been in politics over 45 years, is quite able to do this political calculus and certainly able to find commonalities between immigrants in France and the working-class indigenous French who might be swayed by Le Pen’s poisonous rhetoric. He started out in the Socialist Party and has moved only left since – to his immense credit, given that everyone else has been busy selling out and moving right. He is no political chameleon or careerist. With any luck, he will be the next president of France.
Eve Ottenberg is a novelist and journalist. Her latest novel is Old Man Alone. She can be reached at her website.
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