Emphatic, pugnacious and demanding: the style met the moment in the far-left leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s speech to a fired-up crowd of thousands celebrating victory in Sunday’s French legislative elections, reports The New York Times.
Standing before supporters in the working-class 20th arrondissement of Paris, Mr. Mélenchon addressed himself to President Emmanuel Macron, and not politely. “The president should either resign or name one of us prime minister,” he declared.
Other leftist leaders have said that there should be “discussions” about the future of the country. Not this one. The crowd on Sunday roared.
Mr. Mélenchon’s tone and hard-line stance have given him a devoted, youthful following — the only leftist leader with one — and made him both adored and hated, marginalized and central in French politics. More French have a negative opinion of him, 73 percent, than they do of Marine Le Pen, the leader of the far-right National Rally. But he also attracts large crowds who hang on his every word, as they did on Sunday.
Now he is necessarily at the center of the discussion of what might lie ahead for France: his brand of leftism or the milder form represented by his critics within the winning leftist coalition, the New Popular Front. His party, France Unbowed, won the most seats in Parliament, 75, in the coalition.
He has said the person chosen to lead the government should be himself. Unlike the other leaders on the left, he has come close to the presidency, nearly making it to the runoff two years ago. He told France 5 television on June 22 that “very obviously” he was ready to be prime minister. “I intend to govern this country,” he said.
It is a prospect that even members of Mr. Mélenchon’s own coalition, wary of what is viewed as his intermittent extremism, have vowed will never happen. “If he really wants to help the New Popular Front, he should put himself off to the side,” said François Hollande, the mild-mannered former president, a Socialist and now newly elected deputy, two weeks ago. “He should just shut up.”
He is not going to, and that is both a source of his support and his major problem with the others in the leftist coalition that almost immediately threatens to fracture despite its narrow victory on Sunday.
“The problem they will have, when the president looks for a new government, the others don’t want Mélenchon,” said Gérard Grunberg, a political scientist and research director emeritus at the National Center for Scientific Research. “He makes a real union of the left impossible. He’s very provocative. The left is totally disunited.”
For now, France is without a government, and it is not clear how it will get one. No party or alliance won a majority in the elections. Despite that fact, Mr. Mélenchon said on Sunday, “We’re not going to cancel a page or a comma of our program.”
That program is a redistributionist, egalitarian, hostile-to-capitalism economic vision that was inspired in large part from Mr. Mélenchon’s 2022 presidential platform.
On Sunday, he spoke of the coalition’s economic plans as if he owned them: raising the monthly after-tax minimum wage to 1,600 euros, from 1,398 euros (or about $1,700 from about $1,500) — “We’ll decree it,” Mr. Mélenchon said; freezing prices on food, energy and fuel; $162 billion in taxes on the rich.