Mao Zedong had a dictum: “Everything under heaven is in utter chaos. The situation is excellent.” As Mao saw it, disorder creates the perfect conditions for revolution. So it’s no surprise that Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the 73-year-old leader of the French radical Left, is beaming these days.
France, after all, has descended into chaos. The national debt has hit record highs. No budget has been voted for 2026. And the government is unlikely to last more than a week.
Prime Minister François Bayrou is on track to lose a confidence vote on 8 September. Since there is no majority in the National Assembly, no one knows what comes next. President Emmanuel Macron could try to appoint a new prime minister — if anyone can command enough support — or call snap legislative elections.
Not if Mélenchon gets his way. The founder of the La France Insoumise party (LFI) wants Macron’s head. The President must resign. “We are in a regime crisis,” he declared, channelling his inner Robespierre. “What is on the agenda now is moving to a Sixth Republic.” Since Macron won’t oblige, he has ordered his MPs to file a motion to impeach the President. It stands no chance of succeeding, but that doesn’t matter to Mélenchon. He has also supported a mass strike on 10 September.
These aren’t just the hijinks of an ageing Trotskyist longing for the revolutionary frissons of his youth. Mélenchon is a leading personnage on the French political scene. He ditched the Parti Socialiste to form his own outfit in 2008. Nearly 20 years and a few name changes later, LFI is a force to be reckoned with. It holds 71 seats in the French Parliament, making it the third largest group after Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National and President Emmanuel Macron’s Ensemble.
But Mélenchon has loftier ambitions than parliamentary democracy. His obsession is the presidency: he has run three times. He posted his best result in 2022, finishing third in the first round with 22% of the vote, just behind Le Pen at 23.2%. Fear not, though, the révolution was merely postponed. Everyone in Paris knows he’s gearing up for another run in 2027 — or sooner if Macron throws in the towel.
Mélenchon is unlikely to become president — and he probably knows it. He is too radical to win over the majority of voters at the ballot box. But that’s not his real concern. A revolutionary at heart, Mélenchon wants to foment chaos and become the uncontested leader of the shambolic French Left. The LFI as well as the Communists, Greens, and Socialists came together at the last election under the umbrella of the Nouveau Front Populaire. But the alliance exists only on paper. Its leaders can’t agree on anything. Mélenchon wants all of them to follow him. Only then will the Left be saved.
But far from being the saviour of the French Left, Mélenchon is its executioner. His craving for power has led him to betray every principle the Left is supposed to uphold. La France Insoumise runs counter to Republican ideals of liberté, égalité, fraternité. It is the mirror image of Le Pen’s Rassemblement National. Both parties are built on exclusion. They just disagree about who is to blame for France’s troubles.
“Far from being the saviour of the French Left, Mélenchon is its executioner.”
To even call LFI Left-wing is to besmirch the long tradition of French socialism as a force for progress. Mélenchon’s party spurns the animating ethos of the French Left: universalism. All citizens are equal in the eyes of the Republic. Race and religion aren’t important. That’s not to say the French Left ignores discrimination — it doesn’t — but the fight against discrimination is ultimately a fight for everyone to be treated the same.
Not so in the eyes of LFI. The party is openly sectarian. It flirts with Islamists — including groups linked to the Muslim Brotherhood — and exploits religious grievances. Look no further than its attacks on laïcité (secularism): the Republican principle that religion belongs to the private sphere. When Macron’s government banned the traditional Muslim abaya robe from schools, LFI was up in arms. Mélenchon accused the government of being “obsessed” with Islam. His sycophantic sidekick, Manuel Bompard, fumed that secularism was being exploited “to stigmatise one religion in particular”.
Nothing could be further from the truth. Banning teenage girls from wearing the abaya in the Republic’s schools is no more anti-Muslim than banning the kippa is antisemitic or banning the turban is anti-Sikh. To pretend otherwise is a deliberate provocation. In a country scarred by repeated Islamist attacks, including the beheading of a school teacher, that’s indecent.
Indecency, however, is hardwired into the DNA of LFI. Any greatest hits compilation would have to include its press release on 7 October 2023. “The armed offensive of Palestinian forces led by Hamas comes in a context of intensification of Israel’s policy of occupation in Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem,” it began. “We deplore the Israeli and Palestinian dead.” It ended by calling for a “ceasefire” and “the end of colonisation”. Nowhere does it mention that the Islamist group had killed more than a thousand Jews in a pogrom of medieval barbarity.
Believe it or not, it’s only gone downhill from there. Mélenchon and his henchmen have refused to call Hamas terrorists. For them, the plight of the Palestinian people is just a political weapon. The target: anyone who expresses even a modicum of support for Israel. In many cases, it reeks of antisemitism.
And in this respect, Mélenchon leads the pack, of course. He accused Yaël Braun-Pivet, the Jewish President of the National Assembly, of “camping in Tel Aviv to encourage the massacre”. He also attacked his former friend, the Jewish Socialist Jérôme Guedj, for “pleading for an ‘in-between’ between genociders and supposed supporters of the ‘erasure of Israel’.” In reality, Guedj is a steadfast supporter of the two-state solution and a vocal critic of Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-Right government. His only crime: defending Israel’s right to exist — and being Jewish.
But there’s no low Mélenchon won’t stoop to. “What’s interesting,” he added about Guedj, “is watching him fidget around the post where the leash of his affiliation keeps him tied.” Guedj’s response says it all: “I must say of the man I deeply loved that he’s become an antisemitic bastard.”
How did that happen? And how did LFI become so toxic? To figure that out, you have to go back to the very beginning of Mélenchon’s political career.
Mélenchon started out on the far-Left in the Seventies. But he wasn’t just on the far-Left, he was a Trotskyist. And he wasn’t your milquetoast Trotskyist either, he was a Lambertist. Lambertists took their name from Pierre Lambert, the leader of the revolutionary Organisation Communiste Internationaliste (OCI). Mélenchon spent three years in the OCI. Although he doesn’t like to talk about them, he has admitted they were “very important years in my intellectual formation”.
Mélenchon learned operating principles in the OCI that still guide him today. For one, the leader is always right. Lambert was domineering and distant — there was no internal democracy at OCI. What the red godfather said went. Mélenchon runs LFI the same way. It’s his fiefdom. When talking to the media, he likes to portray himself as a mentor to fledgling progressives. “We never had youth organisations for one reason,” he said recently. “The young people were the ones who were running the show!” Ever the altruist, he added: “I’m just one element.”
But that’s propaganda even Pravda wouldn’t have run. “La France Insoumise is me!” he once exclaimed. According to La Meute, a new exposé by French muckrakers Charlotte Belaïch and Olivier Pérou, Mélenchon runs his party like a “cult”.
“This isn’t about the angry outbursts of an authoritarian man, but about domination and submission,” Belaïch and Pérou write. “It’s not about the discipline needed to win power, but about control.” As one LFI MP told the reporters: “Normally, you wouldn’t let anyone treat you the way Jean-Luc treats you. Not even your mother or your father could make you crawl like that.”
Like his old boss Lambert, Mélenchon loves nothing more than a good purge. Every few years, he “renews” the movement and promotes the youth. Supposedly, it keeps his finger on the pulse of the masses. In truth, it’s a smokescreen. Mélenchon can’t stand anyone stealing his limelight. Far from mentoring a new generation, he crushes anyone who shows promise. Even if that means dissing collaborators who have stood by him for decades.
Instead, Mélenchon has packed LFI with dunces, charlatans and fanatics. They’ve turned the National Assembly into a crèche. The breakout star has to be Sébastien Delogu — a trade union representative and Mélenchon’s former driver, now MP for Marseille North. “Mélenchon is God, and me, I am the son of God,” Delogu likes to say.
The 38-year-old speaks five words a minute, so profound are his thoughts. He once admitted on live radio that he didn’t know who Philippe Pétain was. “I’ve heard about him, and I know that apparently he’s a racist,” Delogu said.
Mélenchon learned another important lesson from his time with Lambert: you must be willing to do anything to gain power. What set Lambertists apart on the far-Left was their duplicity. Lambert realised it would be impossible to stage a revolution. It wasn’t 1789 anymore. He had no popular support. So, instead, he adopted a strategy of entryism. He planted undercover agents in other Left-wing movements, such as the Parti Socialiste. Mélenchon joined the party in 1976, shortly after leaving the OCI.
Some Socialists now speculate that Mélenchon was one of Lambert’s moles. “With hindsight, I think: he looked every inch the mole,” said Claude Germon, the former mayor of Massy in the Paris suburbs who hired Mélenchon as his chief of staff in 1978. Julien Dray, a prominent Socialist strategist and erstwhile ally of Mélenchon, agrees. In his book Qui Est Mélenchon, he suggests the latter played a double game for years.
Yet it didn’t pay off: Mélenchon never gained power in the Socialist Party. He spent 20 years as a senator, a marginal post in French politics, and never held a major cabinet role. The best he could manage was a short stint as Minister Delegate for Vocational Education. Whatever Mélenchon did, others did better. He had neither the intellectual heft of Dominique Strauss-Kahn nor the killer instinct of François Hollande. Doomed to be an extra, he quit the Socialists, high on his own ressentiment.
At first, Mélenchon tried to build a traditional Left-wing movement. His objective was to win back the working class from Le Pen’s far-Right. In 2012, he ran to be an MP in the industrial wastelands of Northern France for the Front de Gauche, the precursor of LFI. But, there too, he failed. “It’s the worst campaign I’ve ever had,” he reportedly said, complaining he couldn’t connect with poor white voters. “You understood nothing they said… They were sweating alcohol from morning… They smelt bad… Almost all obese.”
Five years later, Mélenchon failed again: he didn’t qualify for the second round of the presidential election. He was 600,000 votes short. And so he abandoned his plan to compete with Le Pen. That wouldn’t catapult him into power. His new base would be the banlieues — those forgotten corners of the Republic. As Dray explains, “the 600,000 missing votes could be found… in these relegated areas that have gradually become ethnic ghettos with large immigrant populations, where Islam is settling in an endemic way, becoming the only active political force.”
Like a true Lambertist, Mélenchon shed his old skin and reinvented himself. If that meant forsaking his core beliefs, so be it. The end justifies the means. He once waxed lyrical about secularism. He once loathed Islamism. He once called the burqa “degrading” and compared women wearing it to “ghosts”. No matter. The new Mélenchon will play footsie with Islamists and defend the abaya.
The irony is that Mélenchon poses as the defender of French Muslims, but his strategy betrays how little he must think of them. He seems to believe they will be won over with sectarian dog-whistles. Rather than speaking to French Muslims as French citizens, he speaks to them as Muslims. In this respect, he resembles Le Pen.
Herein lies the fatal flaw of Mélenchon’s electoral strategy: it underestimates a diverse Muslim electorate. Yes, it might get him the handful of votes he needs to qualify for the second round of the next presidential election. But it risks alienating many Muslims — and large swathes of the electorate.
Mélenchon doesn’t care. A theory making the rounds in Paris is that Mélenchon doesn’t seriously believe he can be president. If he faced a far-Right candidate — either Le Pen or Jordan Bardella — in the second round, they would trounce him. Where he has pursued a strategy of radicalism, they have pursued one of “de-diabolisation”. In the eyes of the majority of French voters, the devil is now Mélenchon. That suits him just fine: deep down he remains a Trotskyist. His bet is simple. If the far-Right wins, civil war will erupt between the state and the banlieues. You can guess who will lead the Résistance.
