Once the polls are closed, France holds its breath. Like and more than last June – two weeks of clashes and looting unleashed in the suburbs – and the devastating marches of the “gilets jaunes” in 2018. Until the runoffs, tension will remain very high. From Paris to Lyon, from Bordeaux to Rennes and Grenoble as in the rest of the Hexagon, shopkeepers, restaurateurs and shopping centers have decided to suspend their activities and barricade themselves. To protect their businesses, the operators pulled down the shutters, raised panels and started the countdown. Meanwhile, the police are heavily patrolling the targets at risk and public buildings.
What is frightening are the announced demonstrations of the far left led by Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the leader of the Nouvel Front Populaire. A strange but aggressive caravan, created solely to stop the march of Bardella and co., in which angry leftists, old Stalinists, “anti-racists” and other left-wing confetti are found together with the reborn socialists of Raphael Gluksmann, third force (with the 13, 8 percent) at the European elections in June. A temporary yet very fragile alliance. Despite the reassurances of the much more moderate (but naive) Gluksmann, the pyrotechnic Mélenchon is obviously the absolute star of the NFP.
Already a Trotskyist in his youth and then a socialist minister with Jospin, in 2008 he broke with the PS and in 2016 he built his own party (La France Insoumise), becoming a permanent presence on the transalpine political scene. Thanks to his overwhelming oratory and great unscrupulousness, the man is capable of interpreting the discontent of different (and heterogeneous) segments of the fragmented French society: former communists and anarchists but also multi-ethnic tribes from the suburbs, woke militants and other assorted lumps of desperation urban. In his narrative all of them are the “people of Creole France”, the other “people” without representation, rights and power. A demagogic but partly rewarding vision. His colorful supporters appreciate verbal violence – in his last television speech he sneered when a journalist reproached him for the macabre NFP slogan “every dead flic is a vote less for the RN” – and they appreciate the condescension towards Hamas and ‘Islamo-leftism, the last sad frontier of the Gallic left.
When the first data appeared, Mélenchon did not disappoint his audience. Having humiliated poor Gluksmann again, he took the whole scene for himself and, thanks to the good result (28-29 percent), he re-launched the challenge to the Lepenists, asking in turn for the absolute majority for NFP (i.e. for himself), offering a pseudo desistance to moderate dislikes. «For the second round, the NFP is present in a duel in most cases, most often against the RN. According to our principles, nowhere will we allow the RN to win.” Difficult to convince the opposing electorates to converge. And then the old Trotskyist knows his people and already foresees the outcome.
Better to be the first of the opponents than a supporting player in a coalition government with the detested occupant of the Elysée. On closer inspection, the same calculation was made with Chirac by Marine Le Pen’s father. Governing scares demagogues.
