There’s an irrepressible quality to Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the battle-hardened, razor-witted, and formidably erudite leader of France’s foremost force on the political Left, La France Insoumise (LFI: France Unbowed). To the dismay of his multiple enemies, and the horror of the French establishment, he simply refuses to lay down his weapons, terminate his pugnacious political presence, and retreat meekly into his twilight years.

Mélenchon’s enduring ability to set the pace, define the parameters of debate and then run circles round his political opponents, often driving them into panting, breathless displays of ignorance, intellectual shallowness and muddled thinking, distinguishes him from the current crop of European (or indeed Western) leaders. So, too, does his combat readiness, the palpable delight he takes in jousting with combatants in routinely hostile media contexts, in tweaking the noses of opportunists and establishment stooges. Confident, well-read, and able to draw on extraordinarily rich reserves of personal and political experience, he leaps and spars with the savvy playfulness of a veteran dolphin, ever ready to zero in on his prey.

In early May this year, the septuagenarian (Mélenchon will turn 75 in August) declared on television that for the fourth consecutive time he was throwing his hat into the ring to be President of France. A month later, on June 7, his candidature for the 2027 presidential race was formally launched at a rapturous mass rally at Saint-Denis in Paris, the capital’s most populous suburb and a citadel of the Left, with a rich working-class history and a diverse, multicultural population.

Between those two dates, close to 3,00,000 people across France had gone online to formally endorse Mélenchon’s candidacy, well exceeding the original target of 1,50,000 signatories. This public pledge of support and readiness for activism must already be the envy of his principal political rivals, Edouard Philippe on the centre right and Jordan Bardella, the poster-boy candidate of the neo-fascist National Rally. As for Emmanuel Macron, currently confronting political oblivion as his two-term presidential stint slouches towards its long-awaited end, popular support on this scale is simply beyond his most frenzied dreams.

Political beginnings

There is little about Mélenchon that speaks to convention or places him anywhere near the regular run of French politicians. Born in 1951 in Morocco, then still under French colonial rule, he began life as the son of a Spanish postmaster and his Spanish-Sicilian wife. Following his parents’ divorce, he accompanied his mother to France in 1962, eventually settling with her in the country’s mountainous eastern Jura region. As a teenager, he plunged into the nationwide student uprising of 1968, becoming one of the leaders of his local town’s high school movement. His involvement in left-wing student politics continued during his university years at Besançon, where he obtained degrees in modern literature and philosophy.

After completing his studies, Mélenchon was for a few years active in the OCI (Internationalist Communist Organisation), at the time a moderately successful formation on the Trotskyite Left, becoming a leading figure in its Besançon branch. Then, in 1976, he quit the revolutionary Left to enter the PS (Socialist Party), then well into a process of radicalisation under the helm of François Mitterrand, who envisioned the party replacing the PCF (French Communist Party) as the hegemonic force on the French Left. Mélenchon rose swiftly through the ranks, gaining his first elected offices (in municipal councils close to Paris) before entering the Senate, France’s upper chamber of Parliament, in 1986, aged 35.

Learning lessons within mainstream social democracy

Mélenchon’s 30-year experience within France’s premier party of social democracy proved an invaluable learning process. It coincided first with Mitterrand’s two-term presidency (1981-95), and then with the premiership of Lionel Jospin (1997-2002); both instances involved cohabitation with the right, offering Mélenchon a ringside seat on the possibilities and limitations of pushing a left reformist programme under the constraints imposed by France’s Fifth Republic and the global turn to neoliberalism.

Participation in government (where Mélenchon served under Jospin as Minister for Vocational Education until the socialist leader’s crushing defeat by Jacques Chirac in the 2002 presidential elections) offered him valuable experience while reinforcing his growing dissatisfaction with the PS as an agent of change. Beginning early in Mitterrand’s presidency, the party’s compromising tendencies, in particular its readiness to accommodate neoliberalism through growing reliance on privatisation and austerity measures, could only deepen inner-party cleavages.

Despite initially supporting the 1992 Maastricht Treaty, which formally established the European Union, Mélenchon found himself increasingly at odds with the EU’s direction of travel—and his party’s readiness to meekly follow it. By the late 1990s, he was actively opposing further European economic and political integration, campaigning against France’s transition to the euro and its endorsement of the 1997 Treaty of Amsterdam, under which member states agreed to surrender a broad range of powers to the European Parliament. The run-up to the 2005 referendum on whether to draw up a new constitution for the European Union saw Mélenchon campaign strenuously (and, as it proved, successfully) for a “No” vote, alongside other prominent Left players, the spirited, rambunctious peasant leader José Bové among them. It was obvious that a parting of the ways between the PS and its wayward, ever-leftward-shifting veteran was inevitable. Mélenchon finally quit the PS in 2008.

Experimentation

Since shaking free of the conventions and restraints associated with work within a mainstream centre-Left party, Mélenchon has emerged as a thoughtful explorer of new ways of doing Left politics. His efforts have focused on revivifying, reconfiguring and consolidating the French Left so as to make it the driving force of a sweeping reformist agenda.

Directly after leaving the PS, he launched a new party of the Left, broadly modelled on Die Linke (The Left), founded in Germany in 2007 as a fusion between the radical Left and surviving elements of the former East German Communist Party. By 2009, Mélenchon’s French variant, le Parti de Gauche (the Party of the Left), was in formal alliance with the PCF in a Left Front (Front de Gauche) to fight the upcoming European elections.

It was as a joint candidate of the Left Front that Mélenchon made his first presidential run in 2012. The experience exposed the limitations of the Left Front while establishing Mélenchon as a formidable and charismatic campaigner, able to attract tens of thousands of supporters to electrifying mass rallies. To the consternation of the state, and the political and media mainstream, his pre-election polling figures rose well beyond early projections, at one point reaching 14 per cent of voter preferences. In the end, various factors, among them a multiplicity of rival Left candidates, contributed to his taking fourth place in the first round of voting, securing 11.10 per cent of the vote and gaining the support of just short of four million voters.

Mélenchon sensed that something different was required, that a dynamic new reformism of the Left demanded something other than a traditional party structure. With this perspective shared by a growing cohort of younger activists, the search began for a looser, nimbler basis for mobilisation, responsive to what was evidently a generalisation of political class consciousness following a sequence of mass strikes and popular revolts.

In 2016, La France Insoumise propelled itself onto the French political landscape with something approaching the shock of a thunderbolt. No one, least of all the stultified ranks of the French establishment, could have anticipated this degree of rupture with past political practice.

La France Insoumise: a new trajectory for the Left?

Conceived as a movement, not a party, LFI has no formal membership and no branch organisation. Its rejection of the traditional party model draws on growing popular hostility to political parties per se and represents an attempt to move beyond the factionalism and conflict endemic in many Left groups in France. Instead of branches, the movement operates through hundreds of local action groups, each with a large measure of autonomy, the whole network mediated through the internet. The core strategy is to win elections, initiate radical constitutional changes that roll back presidential powers, augment people’s democratic rights, and enrol the powers of the state to further the interests of ordinary people.

From any grounded perspective, this is hardly a prospectus for revolution. Yet the growth of the LFI over the past ten years, its electoral successes (there’s currently a bloc of 71 LFI representatives in France’s national parliament), its spirited, principled interventions in solidarity with France’s besieged minorities and racialised Muslim population, and its no-holds-barred denunciation of Israel’s genocide in Palestine: all this has been enough to stir an establishment-wide tsunami of foaming, fulminating rage.

Predictably, Mélenchon has been taking the brunt of the onslaught. What an upstart he is, his detractors squawk. Look at him flaunting himself, manipulating his way to power! How dare he garner such a quantity of popular support (19.58 per cent of the first-round vote in his 2017 presidential run; close to 22 per cent in the 2022 race; seven million voters and rising)! Let’s put the smear machine on full throttle; let’s call him anti-semitic, a careerist, a peril to the nation!

To which Mélenchon’s unvarying response is “Bring it on!” If not quite Shakespeare’s greyhound “in the slips/ straining upon the start”, he can be likened to a seasoned warhorse, thrilling to the bugle’s blast, champing on the bit, and summoning a lifetime’s worth of experience, energy, and nerve for the action ahead.

Susan Ram has spent much of her life viewing the world from different geographical locations. Born in London, she studied politics and international relations before setting off for South Asia: first to Nepal, and then to India, where fieldwork in Tamil Nadu developed into 20 years of residence.