His meetings have been overflowing with people, there has not been a single misstep in communication terms for a month and the polls are slowly but surely edging up. But will the war in Ukraine now change the course of Jean-Luc Mélenchon's campaign, ahead of the French presidential elections next month? For the last few days the candidate for the radical-left La France Insoumise party has been at the centre of a major political row, one driven by his direct rivals on the Left. Yannick Jadot, the candidate for the green Europe Écologie-Les Verts (EELV) party, has accused Mélenchon of “indulgence” towards Vladimir Putin's regime while Socialist Party candidate Anne Hidalgo has gone further by talking of his “complicity”.
At a political rally on Saturday February 26th at Saint-Denis on the French Indian Ocean département of La Réunion, Mélenchon spoke at length about Ukraine to an audience of 2,000 and sought to defuse the situation. “I ask for my position to be respected – our position, as you have just shown me your agreement with your applause – and that the caricatures stop. Perhaps non-alignment isn't the right idea, perhaps anti-globalist diplomacy isn't the right idea, but discuss it for what it is!”
Calling for a peaceful resolution to the conflict in the face of “blowhards” Joe Biden and Emmanuel Macron, he made clear that even if the commentators did not like it, he had “not changed position”. He told his audience: “Since 2014 I have kept repeating that we won't carry on humiliating Russia by continuing to push NATO to its gates ... we cannot trust the side of the defeated [editor's note, he is referring to the Americans in Iraq in particular], who abandon people along the way.”
Enlargement : Illustration 1
So there is no change in his position. But it only took a few days for the tone, at least, to alter.
On Monday February 21st, at a time when Emmanuel Macron still thought he could broker face-to-face talks between Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin, Jean-Luc Mélenchon published a statement which, coming as it did in the middle of an election campaign, provided more than a little ammunition to his detractors.
In the statement the La France Insoumise candidate joined in the chorus of condemnation over Vladimir Putin's decision to recognise the two pro-Russian breakaway territories in the east of Ukraine. However, there was no word about the plight of the Ukrainian people and - in the name of diplomatic 'non-alignment' - his words appeared to equate the responsibility of the United States and Russia in the affair. On February 10th, during the television election programme 'Élysée 2022' Mélenchon had also asserted: “The Russians must not cross the border and the United States must not annex the Ukraine through NATO.”
This stance was considered sufficiently enigmatic within his own movement that some figures felt obliged to take to Twitter a few hours later to indicate their own “unreserved” condemnation of President Putin's actions.
But three days later, on Thursday February 24th, the day of the Russian invasion, it was a very different Mélenchon who spoke out. From La Réunion he issued an early-morning statement that was crystal clear. “Russia is attacking Ukraine. An act of pure violence … Our thoughts and compassion are for the population who are victims,” wrote the presidential candidate, who called for an “immediate ceasefire and for the withdrawal of all foreign troops in Ukraine”.
This time the tone was consensual, pacifist and condemned Vladimir Putin's actions without ambiguity. The day after Russian forces entered Europe Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who is normally not very fond of the use of flags other than the French tricolore on the front of French republication institutions, even suggested “displaying the colours of Ukraine on all official buildings in solidarity with the Ukrainian people”.
Behind the scenes the candidate's team has also been hard at work spreading the message and communicating the party's stance on international affairs. This included a compilation video from the archives in which Jean-Luc Mélenchon can be seen declaring that “it doesn't make you a Putin supporter to say that you shouldn't make war” (2014), describing “Mr Putin” as a “great nationalist” (2017) and embracing Sergei Udaltsov, a political opponent of Putin, whom he was meeting for the first time (2018).
If this was back-pedalling it served little purpose. By the end of last week the firestorm of protest continued to burn away, with greens and socialists blowing as hard as they could on the embers of the France Insoumise candidate's not-so-distant past, highlighting declarations that today come across as misguided leniency towards the Russian government.
The shadow of the Syrian conflict
Is the war dangerous territory for Jean-Luc Mélenchon? Questioned about this during his Indian Ocean trip he continued to try stay above the fray. “This is a good time for me, I'm no clumsy idiot when it comes to international politics, despite the stupid stuff that some come out with.”
Mélenchon, who will speak about the issue at the National Assembly on Tuesday March 1st, can certainly be proud of the fact that he has often been shown to be right in international affairs, for example on Mali, from which French forces are now set to withdraw. Nonetheless, the political attacks from his opponents have dredged up the controversial stances that he has taken on Russia over the years.
First of all there is his attitude towards the war in Syria, where Jean-Luc Mélenchon adopted what might most kindly be described as an 'iconoclastic' position. His analysis of the conflict, over which he had been accused of playing down a Russian intervention that not only stabilised the criminal regime of President Bashar al-Assad, but also saw Russian armed forces taking part in intensive operations, has earned him many reproaches. Some of the attacks on him have been quite blunt, coming from within the Left itself and from French intellectuals.
It's fortunate that Russia was there, for within a year it was that country which achieved what all the other ones who assembled had been unable to do, namely crush the self-styled army of Islamic State.
Even those close to him wondered why he saw the uprising of the Syrian people - which was part of the Arab Spring of 2011 – as just a grim commercial affair involving gas and oil pipelines, when he himself extols the virtues of “citizen revolutions”.
In 2013 the problems grew when Mélenchon raised doubts over the truth of accusations that Assad used chemical weapons to massacre his own people. “We know that the North Americans have a habit of using any old argument to justify a military intervention, this time it's gas. In Iraq it was, well I don't really know what. Each time there are always weapons of mass destruction,” he declared, opposing American intervention on Syrian soil on the grounds of peace.
In 2016, questioned on public broadcaster France 2 about the Russian bombing of Aleppo, he said he thought that Putin was going to “solve the problem” - in other words “eliminate” Islamic State - even though it had no known base in that Syrian city.
Three years later the turn of events showed him wrong. But he continued with the same line. “It's fortunate that Russia was there, for within a year it was that country which achieved what all the other ones who assembled had been unable to do, namely crush the self-styled army of Islamic State,” he said in a speech in the National Assembly. Those words feature in journalist Denis Sieffert's latest book Gauches, les questions qui fâchent ('The issues that provoke arguments on the Left') published by Les Petits Matins in 2021 to which the author devotes a long section on Mélenchon and Syria.
Even today, these memories still fuel the anger of Franco-Syrian activist Firas Kontar. “With Ukraine Mélenchon is trying to redeem himself after ten years of ignominious behaviour,” he said. “But his bias against American intervention in Syria, the question marks he raised over chemical weapons when there could be no more doubt … That discredits him on all geopolitics!”
'The Crimea is lost for NATO. Good.'
Another thorny issue for the France Insoumise leader is his view of Russia's seizure of the Crimea in 2014, which he viewed once again as resistance to “crude North American policy”.
On March 14th 2014 Mélenchon – the same man who last Thursday said that he could “never support someone who crosses a border” - found reason to be happy over the annexation of the peninsula from Ukraine in a blog with the disconcerting title: “The Crimea is lost for NATO. Good.” The content of the blog went on to analyse the move as part of a power struggle between the United States and Russia. And in a striking echo with today he promised Ukraine the same fate as Crimea, arguing that this country of “ultra-nationalists, neo-Nazis or not, and puppets from various bits of the Ukrainian kleptocratic oligarchy” would use “the West” to “blow the country up”.
Fearing at the time that this would lead to a “war against the Russians”, Mélenchon concluded that any such war would be lost from the start. “Who wants to go and fight in the middle of a field of nuclear power stations called Ukraine, where Chernobyl already takes centre stage?” he wondered. “Who is available for an economic crisis worse than that which is already taking place? Who in Germany or elsewhere has found a way of doing without the gas and oil that crosses the Ukraine? No one! The die is cast. Crimea will be Russian and Ukraine will enter a worse crisis.”
A year later, in March 2015, the Crimean issue resurfaced in France after the murder in Moscow of Boris Nemtsov, a Ukrainian opposition figure opposed to the Russian president. Mélenchon's comment that Putin himself was the “main political victim” of the tragedy did not go unnoticed. It even triggered a crisis within the Front du Gauche – the alliance at the time between La France Insoumise and the French Communist Party (PCF). Pierre Laurent, national secretary of the PCF, and Clémentine Autain, then a member of a small party called Ensemble, went public with their anger over their leader's comment.
“To be clear-eyed about the United States' game is one thing. But to go from there to suggest that it might be an operation by the American secret services, that's a line that no political leader should cross because it fuels a conspiracy theory approach,” Autain, who in 2017 became a Member of Parliament for La France Insoumise, told Libération newspaper at the time.
The controversies continued, though they were less intense. It should be pointed out that the 'pro-Russian' faction in Mélenchon's entourage gradually moved away from the movement. At the end of 2018 his international affairs adviser during the previous year, Djordje Kuzmanovic, left to set up his own sovereigntist party. Meanwhile La France Insoumise member Andréa Kotarac joined the far-right Rassemblement National (RN) in 2019. This was just after taking part, alongside RN president Marine Le Pen's niece Marion Maréchal, in a pro-Putin forum in Crimea. At the time Jean-Luc Mélenchon did not criticise him for this, and stated that, on the contrary, it showed that pluralism was welcome in his movement.
Taking sides - a Cold War hangover
But what does remain is Mélenchon's ongoing desire for independence of thought which is expressed in open anti-Atlanticism, and which comes at the risk of minimising the dangers posed by revisionist countries – those that seek to overthrow the status quo - to the international order.
This may well have led to his November 2021 comments to the Le Figaro which have been dug up today. He told the right-wing newspaper: “I don't believe there is an aggressive attitude by Russia nor China. I know these countries, I know their international strategies and their way of addressing issues. Only the Anglo-Saxon world has a vision of international relations that's based on aggression. Other peoples don't all reason like that.” Back in November 2020 he had also told the publication L’Opinion that “the Russians are reliable partners while the United States are not … and not just in the military domain”.
In the section of his 2022 manifesto devoted to international affairs – policies written by a small circle in the party close to the candidate – he thus portrays the United States as the main threat to world peace. This is a form of taking sides that he inherited “from his political wiring which was formed during the Cold War” explain some activists, who privately insist that they do not entirely agree with this line.
“With Mélenchon, as with a great number on the Left internationally, there is this reductionist view that conflicts are always the result of plotting between great powers, in this case the United States and Russia,” notes Marie Peltier, an academic who is a specialist in conspiracy theories, and who analysed in detail the media and political propaganda at the time of the war in Syria. “That's why there's always this idea that the West, and principally NATO, is pulling the strings, and that the Russians are in the end simply resisting American imperialism.”
Moreover, she says, this instinctive reaction has not been fundamentally challenged since the start of the war in Ukraine, as Mélenchon effectively confirmed in his comments on Saturday February 26th in La Réunion. “He wants to portray himself as the president of a united Left, so he smooths over the rough edges. It's a tactical U-turn, not an ideological one,” she said.
Erasing the past?
Be that as it may, La France Insoumise is closing ranks and many in the party prefer not to rake over the coals of the past. The statement issued on Thursday February 24th was greeted with relief by those inside the party who were a little apprehensiveness as to what the 'line' on the conflict would be.
“It's a very positive shift, we should be happy about it,” said Clémentine Autain, who acknowledges that she has not always been “in agreement” with the candidate's line and who said that from now on she only wants to discuss on the basis of the “very clear” press statement issued on Thursday. “The [editor's note, international] situation has changed, Jean-Luc has reacted as a result and that's good,” noted European MP Manon Aubry, who along with Clémentine Autain and another senior party figure, Éric Coquerel, attended the public gathering organised by the party at Place de la République on Thursday evening.
Another of the party's elected politicians, who asked to remain anonymous – proof that the issue is seen as an explosive one internally – acknowledged that “on the issue of inevitable but probably not very effective sanctions, on the need to re-open dialogue with Putin, and on the proposal for neutrality status for Ukraine, we're all in step”. However, some “nuances” could still exist within La France Insoumise, the source suggested, over highlighting the role of NATO as the unique factor behind the conflict.
Inside the movement, where the “non-aligned” stance has consensus support as the cornerstone of Mélenchon's anti-globalist diplomacy, there is universal dismay at the attitude of political rivals and their “nitpicking” over Jean-Luc Mélenchon.
Journalist Aymeric Caron, founder of the anti-speciesism party Révolution Écologique pour le Vivant (REV) and member of the Parlement de l’Union populaire – a popular assembly to help broaden links between Mélenchon's movement and civil society – who has supported non-alignment “for a long time”, cannot hide his irritation. “I haven't done the research to find all of Jean-Luc's declarations on international politics over the last 30 years but I can tell you that his legitimate criticism of NATO has nothing to do with any support for Putin! And in the present case, Jean-Luc's denunciation of the aggression and the invasion launched by Putin is absolutely unambiguous. Who in good faith can claim otherwise?” he asked.
The journalist continued: “It's quite shocking that Jadot and Hidalgo are using international issues, which are infinitely complex, to try to discredit Jean-Luc, all because they're struggling in the polls. You could also say a lot about the line taken by [the green] Europe Écologie-Les Verts who, contrary to the ecologists' pacifist DNA, are now calling for the Ukrainians to be armed. Does the EELV leadership want France to send its soldiers and get into a war with inevitably dramatic consequences?”
Even among the greens there is some disquiet, with Yannick Jadot's stance being seen as too pro-war in a party where a former presidential candidate, Eva Joly, called in 2011 for the “end of military parades on July 14th”, France's national Bastille Day. Alain Coulombel, a member of the EELV national bureau, thinks that the attacks on the La France Insoumise candidate are out of order given the issues at state. “The fact that Mélenchon doesn't want to pile on the anti-Putinism, good; for him to be accused today of being pro-Putin simply shows that the campaign is no longer up to much ...”
The issue is too serious and solemn to be manipulated. It's time to stop lying and change the language!
Another factor is the lasting damage that the attack by the greens and socialists on Mélenchon could cause. How can there be a pact over this year's Parliamentary elections - which follow the presidential contest – between La France Insoumise and those who, such as the independent green MP Delphine Batho, accuse the party of “lenience towards dictators and giving up on defending democracy”?
“The statement by Delphine Batho and the comment by [the Socialist Party's first secretary] Olivier Faure speaking of 'Putin-Insoumise' are insults to the activists and voters who are, I might point out, leading the way on the Left. Lying about Jean-Luc's current position is unacceptable and won't get the Left anywhere,” said Clémentine Autain, who attacked the “huge cynicism” of those “candidates who are losing momentum who want to regain progress on the backs of the Ukrainians”.
Euro MP Martine Aubry noted: “The issue is too serious and solemn to be manipulated. Of course one can discuss words and proposals but it's time to stop lying and change the language!”
Will there be negative fallout from these rows during an election campaign in which the remaining 40 or so days look set to be devoted to international issues? Jean-Luc Mélenchon himself does not fear that and has called, in vain, for a debate on the issue with Emanuel Macron. Meanwhile, La France Insoumise's Éric Coquerel thinks that “all these rows launched by the greens and the socialists [editor's note, about Russia and Mélenchon] impact on very small circles.” He added: “Using this for political ends, to eke out 0.5% in the polls, is not something to be very proud of. The people are more intelligent than that.”
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- The original French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Michael Streeter