FROM OUR CORRESPONDENT
PARIS – “Shut him up!” It is as if François Hollande’s outburst, heard two weeks ago during a public meeting in his constituency of Corrèze, had become an instruction for use. The former president, back on the scene with these legislative elections, had been told a rather innocuous phrase by his former Socialist Party comrade, who for a dozen years has become the leader of the radical left of La France Insoumise: “Many people think it’s a good idea for me to be Prime Minister.” But that was enough, with the addition of “sometimes feeling ostracized,” to unleash a hornet’s nest within the New Popular Front, and even outside. Why we always end up talking about Jean-Luc Mélenchon. And despite increasingly vigorous calls for secrecy, he has no intention of keeping quiet. The united left has done everything it can to prove that the new alliance was not a decoy, constructed by different entities that until a few days before the dissolution of the National Assembly detested each other. The only way to do this was to ignore the name of the future prime minister, in case victory had come. We’ll talk about it later, it was the joint decision of the NFP leaders.
But it is into this silence that the usual stentorian voice of the tribune Mélenchon intervened, always repeating the same concept. “Even though I don’t want to impose myself, I feel capable of being Prime Minister”“I intend to govern this country,” he repeated on the closing Saturday of the electoral campaign to the microphones of France 5. There would be nothing wrong with that.
If it were not for the fact that even his allies, and some of his collaborators, consider him a polarizing personality. Even within his own electoral basin. Outside the vast courtyard of the Insoumis, the man who has been a presidential candidate three times It certainly does not enjoy unanimous consensus on the left, and at the same time because of its often extreme positions, acts as a scarecrow among French public opinion.
A founding father of the NFP, but one to be kept hidden from the eyes of France, his paradox is this. But Jean-Luc Mélenchon has no intention of accepting a fate as an unwelcome guest. And the more he speaks, the more he creates embarrassment and division on the sore point of the alliance. The accusations of anti-Semitism leveled against him and other LFI exponents were one of the causes that prevented the Nouveau Front populaire from breaking the psychological and other threshold of 30 percent.
It matters little that the alliance has signed a joint document condemning the “disturbing explosion”, long denied by Mélenchon, “of racist, anti-Semitic and Islamophobic acts”. Past statements count, and the leader of the Insoumis has never spared himself anything in terms of ambiguity on the subject. For his own allies, the Socialists, the Greens and especially Glucksmann’s Place Publique, the majority shareholder of the coalition, he is an unpresentable person “who has no chance of being prime minister”.
In the courtyard of the National Assembly where the first-rounders showed up for a group photo yesterday, there was no talk of the generous mass withdrawal of the third-placed LFI in the “triangular” constituencies, there was no talk of the remaining chances of obtaining a true left-wing majority. At one point, his most faithful Sophia Chirikou blurted out. “It’s not possible that you always ask us about this and only this…” Only to then add that in Matignon, the seat of government, if all goes well they will end up with “Mélenchon or another of ours, that’s the deal.”
Alongside her, her colleague Mathilde Panot denounced the “siege” of Mélenchon as a “perfidious maneuver” to “equate LFI to the Front National” and invited “the whole world” to heal from this “general psychosis”. Lepenist enemies are aware of the efforts of the Front Populaire to hide the cumbersome founding father and his ambitions. Jordan Bardella made it a catchphrase of his election campaign. “Why are you here?” he asked during a televised debate between the prime ministerial candidates, addressing the “substitute” of the Insoumis Manuel Bompard. “Send your boss here, instead of making him advance in disguise.”
The allies preach caution. But discretion has never been his prerogative. And he certainly does not intend to change, not even for the sake of the left. Just yesterday he took to his social media to say that Marine Le Pen’s young heir apparent is right: “There is a need for a comparison between the two different projects for the French.” But for the debate, he invited him to turn to Bompard and two other LFI leaders. Bardella’s response was instantaneous. “So I have to deduce that you are running away? Let’s get out of the ambiguity: you took 22 percent in the presidential elections, you say you want to govern the country: it is you who must come to discuss.” We always come back to that. To Jean-Luc Mélenchon, and to the strange fate of the French left. Neither with him, nor without him.
