He has called for a top rate of income tax of 90 per cent, wants France to leave Nato and has chatted with Jeremy Corbyn in Spanish about their shared admiration of Latin American revolutionaries, reports The Sunday Times.
With just four weeks to go until the presidential election, the veteran leftist Jean-Luc Mélenchon, 70, is enjoying a surge in the polls that has raised the prospect that he, rather than one of his far-right rivals, may yet face Emmanuel Macron in the run-off to enter the Elysée Palace.
“The fact I could reach the second round changes the discourse,” he said last week, claiming the debate was shifting towards the rising cost of living and away from issues such as immigration. “It’s a more classic left-right debate, instead of this incredible situation where you have people arguing about Muslims.”
Since polls show Macron way ahead of his rivals, with at least a quarter of first-round votes, the only real question is whom he would meet — and probably trounce — in the run-off on April 24th. Until recently, the assumption has been it would be one of the two far-right candidates, Marine Le Pen, whom Macron defeated in 2017, or the polemicist Éric Zemmour.
Le Pen, whose support is about 17 per cent, still seems to be best placed to take on Macron, but some polls put Mélenchon in third place last week. Though he is still only on 13 per cent or so, this compares with just 9 per cent a few weeks ago.