In recent weeks, Benoît Hamon and Jean-Luc Mélenchon have been ploughing their political furrows, criss-crossing France, addressing meetings and outlining their programmes for the presidency, reports The Guardian.
But for the candidates of the Socialist party (PS) and hard-left movement La France insoumise (Unsubmissive France), the results have been distinctly underwhelming.
Amid the travails of France’s mainstream right, whose candidate’s ever-deepening woes have been dominating media coverage, there has been little space left for the left. Both Mélenchon, a hard-left firebrand, and Hamon, a staunchly leftwing rebel outsider, are struggling to make their voices heard.
Mélenchon, who took 11.1% of the vote in the first round of the last presidential election in 2012 with the backing of the Communist party, has frequently lamented the 2017 campaign is being “hijacked and held hostage” by Les Républicains (LR) and the far-right Front National (FN). But the uproar from the “fake jobs” scandal surrounding François Fillon has drowned out his lament.
“All we’re talking about is this, it’s the decadence of the French Fifth Republic … the system is rotten from within because of money,” Mélenchon told French TV. “We need an electoral campaign. We need to discuss the issues and all we are talking about is an affair that has nothing to do with me. How can we have a democratic debate in these conditions?”
Ali Rabeh, Hamon’s campaign chief of staff, said: “In the meetings people are talking about the real issues. In the media it’s ‘Fillon affair, Fillon affair, Fillon affair’. The debate really has been taken hostage by the right and the far right and that’s complicated for us, because we’re not getting our programme through the media wall.”
Hamon himself, whose platform includes the introduction of a universal basic income, the legalisation of cannabis and a tax on robots, has said the Fillon saga is “saturating the democratic debate”, complaining: “Whenever I’m asked about public services, I’m asked about Fillon. When I want to talk about business, I’m asked about Fillon.”