Enter the disrupter: Far-left Mélenchon seizes momentum in French elections

PARIS — Far-left firebrand Jean-Luc Mélenchon is emerging from this month’s municipal elections as France’s chief political disrupter, building momentum he hopes will turn him into the leading contender against the far right in next year’s presidential race.

The nightmare scenario for France’s beleaguered center left, however, is that Mélenchon would make for a highly divisive presidential candidate, and polling suggests he could ultimately gift a win to the far-right National Rally in 2027.

The 74-year-old former teacher took a highly abrasive, confrontational approach to the local elections — stoking controversy with his unapologetic response to the killing of a far-right activist, and later with comments that were condemned as antisemitic.

But this pugnacious strategy — slammed by his critics as a “brutalization” of politics — seems to have paid off, with his France Unbowed party winning big in key target areas like working-class and immigrant communities in Sunday’s first round.

Mélenchon has hailed his results as a “magnificent breakthrough.” France Unbowed won the poor, diverse city of Saint-Denis in the suburbs of Paris outright, and he looks well-placed to win mayoral contests in the northeastern city of Roubaix and in France’s fourth-largest city, Toulouse.

Divisive leader

Mélenchon’s performance now looks set to have major consequences across France’s political landscape.

He is anathema to France’s centrists, and his political rise only heightens the perception that the country’s leftist camp will be rudderless and riven by internal feuds, just as the country faces its most momentous election in years, with Marine Le Pen and Jordan Bardella from the far-right National Rally as the current favorites for the presidency.

For now, it also looks highly improbable that such an inflammatory figure as Mélenchon can stop the far right if he qualifies for the second round of the presidential vote next year.

While he describes French politics as an “us-against-them” battle on the extremes, and sees France Unbowed as the only party that can lead a “single front” against the far right, polling suggests the French electorate is extremely wary of him.

If Mélenchon were to make it to a runoff in 2027, a poll in November suggested he would be smashed by Bardella. According to the survey by Odoxa, 74 percent would pick the National Rally leader for the Elysée.

“It’s not at all certain that France Unbowed can widen its electorate to the [centrist] Macron-backing voters,” said Ipsos pollster Mathieu Gallard.

“Mélenchon is a great political machine that mobilizes the left-wing electorate … but he is also a machine that scares away more moderate voters,” he said.

Disarray on the left

Not everyone agrees that France Unbowed’s results on Sunday were as emphatic as Mélenchon is making them out to be.

The center-left Socialist Party and its allies are still on track to hold onto many more cities and towns, including Marseille and Montpellier. And the hard left’s combative messaging has not been successful everywhere.

“There are towns where their results are quite disappointing,” said pollster Gallard, pointing to suburbs in Paris and Lyon.

But even if the hard left’s victories turn out to be less impressive on closer inspection, they are still sending shockwaves through the rest of the left.

The Socialist Party, which has been hoping for a comeback after a decade of center-right politics under Macron, is the first and most obvious of Mélenchon’s victims.

The moderate left very publicly condemned France Unbowed when Mélenchon refused to distance himself from the ultra-left group that was involved in the death of far-right activist Quentin Deranque.

Shock then turned to horror last month when Mélenchon was accused of antisemitism after mocking the pronunciation of Jewish names and playing up the Jewishness of convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

“He’s the Jean-Marie Le Pen of our times,” said Raphaël Glucksmann, a Jewish politician from the center left who was targeted by Mélenchon. Glucksmann was referring to Marine Le Pen’s father, who founded the National Front and downplayed the Holocaust.

In the wake of Sunday’s results, Socialist Party leader Olivier Faure tried to hold the line against France Unbowed, pledging there would be no “national alliance.” But within hours the Socialists were striking deals at the local level, including in France’s third-largest city, Lyon. 

“We’ll get attacked all week,” warned Jean-Christophe Cambadélis, a Socialist former lawmaker, who slammed the “lack of clarity” over the party’s position.

“What we’ll win now, we’ll lose in the presidential election because we won’t be credible,” he said.

In another sign of division, the Socialists and the Greens have also been at each other’s throats over whether to team up with France Unbowed.

Gaming the two-round election

For Mélenchon, such divisions are good news.

After blowing up France’s traditional parties, President Emmanuel Macron has left a fragmented political landscape ahead of the 2027 presidential election, along with a weakened centrist coalition. With the French president unable to run for a third consecutive term, there’s a surplus of presidential hopefuls on the starting line.

This could lower the threshold of votes needed to qualify for the runoff vote against the far right. Candidates such as Mélenchon, who have a dedicated and loyal voter base, may be able to pull past more consensual candidates who could cancel each other out.

“That’s his strategy,” said a Socialist Party adviser who, like others quoted in this story, was granted anonymity to discuss party politics.

“We are capable of taking a dive in elections, but France Unbowed never takes a dive, they never go under 10 percent” in national elections, the adviser said.

“But there isn’t a scenario in which he wins in a runoff vote against Bardella.”

The difficulty for the moderate left is compounded by the fact that Mélenchon is one of the most charismatic politicians on the left. He has even drawn the reluctant admiration of Le Pen’s niece, Marion Maréchal, who called him “the most cultured” politician around.

But what’s true of the left is also to some extent true of the conservatives and the center right, which are enmeshed in internal squabbling to see who can assume Macron’s mantle.

“What are the political offers on the table and who is there to embody them?” asked a close ally of the French president.

“I can see what the extremes are offering, but in between, it’s really not clear,” he said.

That’s a gap Mélenchon is trying to exploit.