Can Mélenchon unite the French left?

Shortly before the first round of the French presidential election I was handed a campaign flyer by one of Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s activists. On one side was his photo and on the reverse the headline: ‘With Jean-Luc Mélenchon another world is possible.’ What sort of world? A leftist utopia in which the minimum wage would be raised from its current €1,302 to €1,400 net per month, new hospitals would be built, the retirement age would be lowered to 60, and there would be a fixed price for petrol, food and energy prices. Oh, and there would also be a Sixth Republic.

Quite how Mélenchon would pay for all this, given the state of the country’s finances (France’s national debt is 112 per cent of its GDP), wasn’t explained. But it didn’t need to be. Mélenchon is as good a salesman as he is a politician, and in that regard, he is the polar opposite of Marine Le Pen, who never looks entirely convinced that she knows what she is talking about.

If Mélenchon says another world is possible, then it is – and millions of Frenchmen and women believe him. In the first round of the presidential election this month he finished third, with 22 per cent of the vote, only a few hundred thousand votes behind Le Pen.

Mélenchon, 70, had previously said this year’s presidential race was his last hurrah. But that was before the results came in and he understood how powerful he had become in French politics. Just as he relished playing the kingmaker between rounds, bellowing that none of his voters should cast a ballot for Le Pen, he is now intoxicated with the thought of winning enough seats in the National Assembly to become France’s prime minister.

In the days leading up to the second presidential vote, Mélenchon announced that a coalition of the left, the Popular Union, will contest the parliamentary elections on 12 June.