If you want to know the deep values that drive someone, sometimes you have to look at who they admire, who they throw under the bus and who they refuse to unreservedly condemn. For the French far-left firebrand Jean-Luc Mélenchon, it should by now be clear. After all, the head of the leftwing opposition alliance has been in politics for four decades, and a senator since 1986. He stood as a radical left alternative to Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen in the 2022 presidential elections and almost got through to the second round. But while Mélenchon may have attracted many young voters to his campaign, he is no Bernie Sanders: his refusal to evolve from cold war-era reflexive anti-Americanism and his desire to pursue a “revolutionary” brand of opposition have dragged the French left into unelectability and moral confusion.
As late as 2019, long after Venezuela had ceased to be a democracy and had become, instead, Latin America’s primary source of political and economic refugees, Mélenchon was still publicly expressing admiration for the late Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro.
Or take his record on Vladimir Putin, which is arguably worse – even if he publicly moderated some of his former positions following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Nevertheless, what preceded the first major European war in a generation is telling. For Mélenchon, Putin’s illegal annexation of Crimea was not just understandable, but laudable. “Evidently Crimea is ‘lost’ for Nato. That’s good news,” he wrote on his blog in March 2014. Subsequently, Putin was someone to ally with in Syria. And during the 2017 French electoral campaign, it was American “propaganda” to consider Russia “a threat”.
Even in the days before Putin launched his devastating war, Mélenchon offered consistent obfuscations and excuses for Russia: that it was really just all Nato’s fault, or that the US “must not annex Ukraine into Nato” (countries request to join Nato, by the way; not a single member of the alliance has been “annexed” by it).
Unable to drive France out of Nato and into a “Bolivarian alliance” with Russia and Venezuela, Mélenchon coaxed the rest of the French left into falling in line behind him in an umbrella alliance – the Nupes. This alliance, forged ahead of the 2022 parliamentary elections, was always one of political expediency rather than ideology. Neither Yannick Jadot, a former Greens presidential candidate, nor Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo, of the flagging Socialist party, nor Raphaël Glucksmann, founder of the centre-left Place Publique, share his fondness for autocrats, or other elements of La France Insoumise (LFI)’s policy platform. The Greens are pro-European to Mélenchon’s Europhobia (and, frankly, Germanophobia).
In March 2021, Glucksmann was sanctioned by China’s foreign ministry for speaking out against China’s repression of its Uyghur minority. In August 2022, by contrast, the Chinese embassy in France happily thanked Mélenchon “for his constant support of the one-China policy”.
What might ultimately undo Mélenchon, though, is the perceived ambiguity of his reaction to the bloody events in Israel on 7 October. The 1,400 victims of Hamas included a pregnant woman, elderly people, students with pro-Palestine views attending a concert for peace, children and babies. This was a mass atrocity, a 21st-century pogrom in which more Jews were murdered than at any time since the Holocaust. Mélenchon had days to say that Jewish lives mattered. At best, he has “all lives matter”-ed 7 October instead.
Since the attack, he and other prominent members of his party, LFI, have repeatedly declined to call Hamas a terrorist group (a conclusion the EU came to about Hamas a full 20 years ago). LFI’s initial communique on 7 October used Hamas’s own language about itself, calling the attack “an armed offensive by Palestinian forces” that came “in the context of the intensification by Israel of the policy of occupation of Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem”.
In the midst of the backlash, Mélenchon has doubled down, lashing out at Glucksmann for voting for a European parliament resolution condemning the 7 October attack, while at the same time completely ignoring LFI deputy Danièle Obono, who called Hamas a “resistance movement” days after the details of the massacre had become widely available.
Mélenchon’s account retweeted the (now clearly false) accusation that Israel “chose to massacre families” by bombing al-Ahli Arab hospital. At the time of writing, the repost remains up despite subsequent retractions of their initial reporting from major media organisations.
And after a big pro-Palestine rally in Paris last weekend, Mélenchon posted a picture of the crowd with the words “This is France”, before accusing the president of the national assembly, Yaël Braun-Pivet, of “camping” out in Tel Aviv to “encourage a massacre” in Gaza. Braun-Pivet, who happens to be Jewish, and has been the victim of antisemitism in the past, accused Mélenchon of putting another “target on my back”.
Mélenchon later denied accusations of antisemitism, but LFI is hardly a stranger to the dogwhistle of “dual loyalties” when it comes to French Jews. Jean-Marie Le Pen may have long held the title of antisemite-in-chief in French politics, but antisemitism has been present on the left, too. Mélenchon seemed unbothered by the ways it was woven through the gilets jaunes (yellow vests) protests. Antisemitic incidents in France increased by 70% between 2020 and 2022, and it is significant that Jewish students – 90% of whom say they have experienced antisemitism during their studies – are more frightened of the far left than the far right. But the past two weeks have sent antisemitism into blatant overdrive, with more than 300 reported antisemitic incidents in France — almost as many as during the whole of 2022.
Calling terrorism by its name and acknowledging the real suffering and danger facing Israelis does not preclude protesting against the scale or nature of Israel’s bombardment of Gaza, which has killed thousands of civilians since the 7 October attacks, and its shutoff of water, food and fuel. It doesn’t preclude condemning the tightening of the 16-year siege of Gaza, or thinking that a ground invasion in pursuit of Hamas would be an Iraq-style mistake that would cause many more civilian casualties.
But if you are disturbed by Israel’s response, and you question its legality or morality, who do you think best represents that view – someone with a long history of empathy and wisdom, or someone filled with angry bombast, and who, because of that, is easy to dismiss?
After the 2015 attack on Charlie Hebdo and the kosher supermarket Hyper Cacher, then prime minister Manuel Valls declared that “France without the Jews of France is no longer France.” What a far cry that left is from Mélenchon’s left, which under his leadership has sought to pick fights over everything – even bedbugs. But on the crisis in the Middle East, Mélenchon has a responsibility not to incite fury and domestic tension that could end up putting his own fellow citizens in danger.
A serious intra-left backlash is brewing in France as others distance themselves from Mélenchon’s approach. “Mélenchon, the whole of the left’s problem,” declared Le Monde in an editorial. Reasonable voices on the French left know that after months of division he is no longer fit to lead them, and seem ready for this to be the last straw. The Socialist party has, at the urging of Hidalgo and others, suspended its participation in Nupes, and the Communist party has called for “a new type of union” for the left.
Mélenchon may have made a name for himself as a gifted orator in his younger days, but what is left of whoever he once was seems to consist of delusions of grandeur, petty insults and a deep bitterness that the French have overwhelmingly refused to elect him president.
Mélenchon is interested in fire, rage, revolution and fuelling a vision of France that is disconnected from reality. This has only worked to make everything more extreme, though not necessarily in Mélenchon’s favour. If the French were to find themselves facing a 2027 ballot choice between Marine Le Pen and Jean-Luc Mélenchon, Le Pen would win. It would not even be close. Whether some new grouping forms or not, what’s clear is that the left must dump Mélenchon, and swiftly. For its own good, and for that of France.
Alexander Hurst is a Guardian columnist. He is a France-based writer and an adjunct lecturer at Sciences Po, the Paris Institute of Political Studies
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