Photographer Patrick Artinian is following the French presidential election campaign trail for Mediapart, with a series of photo and video reportages with soundtracks of the candidates, their supporters, meetings and the milestone events. The coverage will continue all the way to the final vote on May 6th.
Here he follows radical-left candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon on what has been a triumphant weekend for the man representing the Front de Gauche (Front of the Left), a coalition of parties sitting on the left of the Socialist Party, and which includes the Communist Party and his own Party of the Left.
Mélenchon, is now rising in opinion polls after a marginal start, and his popularity was demonstrated at a mass rally on Sunday at the Place de la Bastille in Paris, where he delivered a rousing speech before a crowd in excess of 100,000 people, timed to coincide with the uprising of the Paris Commune in 1871.
The charismatic 60 year-old, a maverick former Socialist Party member and junior minister under former socialist Prime Minister Lionel Jospin, has positioned himself as an anti-capitalist firebrand, attacking austerity measures and calling for hefty taxation of corporations, banks and the wealthy, collecting support from the middle ground that stands between the far-left candidates and the moderate-left Socialist Party.
That electorate may prove crucial for Socialist Party candidate François Hollande in the second round election play-off, tipped to be between Hollande and the incumbent candidate, Nicolas Sarkozy.
In his latest reportage, Patrick Artinian begins when Mélenchon on Friday delivered the mayoral sponsorships for his presidential candidature – at least 500 are required for every candidate to be eligible to run – at the Constitutional Council, before capturing the colour and noise of the Sunday rally at the Place de la Bastille. There, Mélenchon, (who will take part in a live debate at Mediapart on Friday to be streamed in freely-accessed video coverage from 8.30 p.m. CET), called on the cheering crowd to mount “a civic insurrection”.
-------------------------
- Patrick Artinian is a Paris-based freelance photographer and a regular contributor to Mediapart, as well as French daily Le Monde, weekly magazine VSD and sports daily L’Equipe. He has previously covered major international events, including the 1989 Armenian earthquake disaster, the 1991 famine disaster in Sudan and the civil war in the former Yugoslavia, in 1993. A member of the Paris photo agency Contact Press Images since 1995, he is currently involved in an extensive photo documentary of contemporary US society.
