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La France Insoumise gives voice to the left-behind, and progressives approve. But many recoil from a leftwing leader whose foreign policy is stuck in 1985, says Guardian Europe columnist Alexander Hurst
Alexander Hurst La France Insoumise gives voice to the left-behind, and progressives approve. But many recoil from a leftwing leader whose foreign policy is stuck in 1985héodore Abitbol is a self-described “militant antifascist,” with degrees in political science and comparative literature, and a bookshelf that ranges from the gender and queer theory of bell hooks to the anti-capitalist social analysis of the Marxist theorist Mike Davis.
The 34-year-old is a regular participant in pro-Palestine protests, and has a decade of full-time activism under his belt: unions, strikes, protests, civil disobedience and vast protest encampments used to block construction projects, known in France as Abitbol should be an in-the-bag vote for Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the leader of La France Insoumise , a longtime fixture of hard-left French politics and a After all, LFI is doing something necessary by focusing on some of France’s most left-behind urban areas and giving voters in them a voice: Bally Bagayoko faced down. The party’s success in these heavily working-class and minority areas is due its willingness to draw new lines around old identity debates, and an intransigent anti-capitalist attitude.
LFI parliamentarians such as Clémence Guetté are actually making innovative and radical proposals, Yet Abitbol demonstrates the single biggest voter faultline between two incompatible French lefts: Mélenchon himself. I mainly remember Abitbol, an acquaintance from my immediate post-student days, as being staunchly opposed to Macron’s economic policies. That hasn’t changed. But he also can’t stomach voting for Mélenchon, he confided when I reached out to him recently, , because of the LFI leader’s stances on Russia,and the EU.
“A part of the left retains a cold-war mentality where Russia is an ally against American imperialism, without seeing that Putin and Trump are in agreement about almost everything in their foreign and domestic policies,” he told me. I don’t believe Abitbol is alone.
They might not admit it as openly, but I think there are millions of French voters who also crave the kind of rupture with capitalism and the status quo that Mélenchon is proposing, but have no desire to go where he would take France on foreign and European policy. French presidential elections rarely hinge on discussions of France’s place in the world.
But the threat posed by Russia to Europe has already dominated the opening days of the 2027 campaign, including a special primetimeat around 17%, enough to qualify for round two of the presidential election. The combined non-Mélenchon left, split between the Ecologists, Socialist party and Communist party, just trails him, with Raphaël Glucksmann leading a split field with around 10% of a first-round vote.
But polling also shows that Marine Le PenIf the divided and riven French left gets this wrong, it could leave millions of pro-European voters in an impossible position, and ultimately put Le Pen in power. The term “zombie lie” is a good way to describe much of Russia’s propaganda about Ukraine.
That Nato provoked the 2022 invasion by “expanding”; that Ukraine was full of neo-Nazis; that Ukraine was developing chemical weapons in secret Nato labs; thatSince the mid-2010s, Mélenchon has consistently advanced many of these claims. In 2014, Mélenchon denounced the Maidan Revolution – when young Ukrainians filled the streets of Kyiv to demand a European future – saying that Russia would have to defend itself against “anof two advanced “Mistral-class” helicopter carriers – both are now part of the French Mediterranean fleet based in Toulon.
Mélenchon joined Marine Le Pen inthe cancellation as the “vassalisation of France to Nato’s bellicose rhetoric”, and accused the then president, François Hollande, of “unbearable betrayal” for having “devalued the worth of France’s word” by refusing to deliver the warships. It’s easier to grasp at phantoms than it is to face the reality that Russia is waging a hybrid war on us, and that tomorrow it will be a ‘classic’ war,” he says.élenchon filled the next seven years alternately invoking international law to condemn the US’s unilateral action in Syria, and dispensing with the same international law when it came to, an “offensive and stupid provocation”.
As for Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia In the four years since Putin’s war, Mélenchon’s personal blog and media appearances have been a grab-bag of theMaking common cause with “the enemy of my enemy” – whatever the consequences for the less powerful – as a shortsighted form of “realist” foreign policy is certainly nothing new.
(Neither, in Mélénchon’s case, does it end at Europe’s borders: “Taiwan is China,” heAfter a summer when France burned and burned and burned, how is the frontrunner for the left a man who is calling for reopening the poison-drip offrom a state that has been, for years, in an undeclared war hybrid war France along with the rest of Europe? It seems Mélenchon, who has wanted to withdraw France from Nato for decades, has not updated his worldview since 1985 when he first held public office.
But this is not the anti-American position it once was: it is simply to attack from the inside what Putin seeks to dismantle from the outside. Mélenchon is not trying to hide his Eurosceptic ideas any more than he has tried to hide his positions on Ukraine.
What he loudly said during the first presidential debate, in late August, is alsoThis is not the way to lead and change an EU that, while imperfect, remains among France’s greatest foreign policy achievements. This is the way to destroy from within the best framework for tackling every modern challenge that transcends borders, from the climate crisis to inequality. ” whenever it sees fit, so can everyone else.
How do we imagine the EU maintaining its emissions trading scheme, and the carbon border tax meant to protect it? How will these – or any other European-level policies – survive if, as Mark Carney might say, a member state’s word becomes something The short answer is: they won’t. The EU will enter an institutional death cycle, of which a deteriorating US is only slowly becoming aware. This is what Europe’s far-right nationalists want.
Is it what Mélenchon supporters want? Mélenchon makes no secret of his desire for France to lead some non-aligned coalition of states geographically more remote, with even less coherent common interests than the existing 27 EU countries. What would all these other potential partners conclude if France were to show that it were ready, in a very Trumpian way, to do the very thing Mélenchon accused Hollande of doing?
To walk all over its word, ratified in treaty with its closest neighbours, with whom it has shared a political community that France itself built? When it comes to foreign and EU policy, Mélenchon is barely distinguishable from Le Pen: a nationalist who believes that France is too small to do anything but close in on itself – and look to Russia for guidance.
If the presidential contest comes down to Mélenchon v Le Pen in the final round then Abitbol says he would vote Mélenchon, but “with vomit in my mouth”. Pity him and the others like him who might have to choose between two equally disastrous visions of France in Europe and the world.
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