For Jean-Luc Mélenchon, France’s hard-left presidential candidate, it is a case of one down, two to go, reports The Guardian.
Opinion polls suggest the veteran political rebel, who is calling for a nonviolent “citizens’ revolution” and for the French constitution to be torn up and rewritten, has overtaken the official Socialist party candidate, Benoît Hamon.
Less than four weeks from the presidential election, Mélenchon is now stalking the rightwing Les Républicains candidate, François Fillon.
If successful, he predicts he will be in a position to launch a serious challenge to independent centrist Emmanuel Macron to reach the second round of the presidential vote and take on the far right’s Marine Le Pen, a woman he loathes so deeply he is reluctant to utter her name.
So far, so Mélenchon – but is this just a political pipe dream? Sitting on a TGV train returning from the Breton city of Rennes, where he had addressed a rally of around 10,000 people, the presidential candidate gives a withering look that suggests nothing of the sort.
“France is the most political nation in Europe and the French are great tragic actors; right now we are in a very explosive situation that is pre-revolutionary,” he told the Guardian.