Jean-Luc Melenchon has broken a taboo in French, and Western, politics. The de facto leader of the French left, whose La France Insoumise party is the driving force of the coalition that won most seats in last July’s legislative elections, told students in Toulouse: ‘Yes, Mr (Eric) Zemmour, there is a Great Replacement! This replacement is that of a generation coming after the other and which will never resemble the previous one’.
Melenchon was aiming his remarks at Eric Zemmour. The controversial journalist turned incendiary politician has came under relentless attack after he promoted the Great Replacement as a central plank of his election manifesto during his run for the French presidency in 2022.
For years, this idea has been dismissed as nothing more than a far-right fantasy. The Guardian described it in 2022 as ‘the racist premise that white Americans and Europeans are being actively “replaced” by non-white immigrants’. But Melenchon, who has been called ‘France’s Jeremy Corbyn’, can hardly be characterised as far-right, even if his comments are somewhat tongue-in-cheek.
Melenchon has talked in the past of building a ‘New France’, constructed on the ‘creolisation’ of the country. But his speech in Toulouse at the end of January was the first time he has explicitly referred to a Great Replacement.
Melenchon doubled down the following day. He addressed another rally in Toulouse organised by an urban working-class organisation, and claimed that rural France is dying, along with the farming industry, and therefore it needs repopulating:
‘As I say to every young person I meet who I know was born like me in the Maghreb (Melenchon was born in Morocco to French parents) or elsewhere: this part of the country is ours, it’s our homeland, it’s our country. This is where your children will be born. This is where your grandchildren will be born. This is our country.’
In response to Melenchon’s declaration, Zemmour accused him of encouraging ‘the conquest of France by a foreign civilisation. You have committed to the downfall of the French people’.
In private, however, one suspects Zemmour will be delighted that a man as prominent as Melenchon has made these comments.
For a number of years in France, there has been growing concern at the sheer scale of immigration; a poll in 2021 asked the question ‘Are you worried about the possibility of a Grand Replacement? Two thirds replied in the positive, and there was even anxiety among left-wing voters, 44 per cent of whom said they saw validity in the theory.
Melenchon’s declaration has not been disputed by any politician from the left or centre. One of his senior lieutenants in the LFI, Eric Coquerel, refrained from mentioning the Great Replacement in an interview. But he accepted that a ‘New France’ was being built, citing the fact that one in four French citizens today have a foreign grandparent, compared to one in ten in 1958, the year the Fifth Republic was born.
The French government recently revealed that a record number of visas were issued in 2024: 2.8 million in total, a 17 per cent increase on the previous year, of which 337,000 were first time visas. In 2014, the number of first time visas was 234,000.
Of the 2.8 million visas, 650,000 were issued to Algerians, 617,000 to Moroccans and 304,000 to Tunisians.
Forty eight hours before Melenchon’s address in Toulouse, the prime minister of France, Francois Bayrou, used the word ‘submersion’ to describe the country’s immigration. The left were incensed. ‘It’s absolutely false,’ raged Mathilde Panot, Melenchon’s number two in the LFI. ‘There’s no flood of migrants into France’.
Many French people see things differently. Million of voters want an end, or curtailing, of mass immigration, but France’s president Emmanuel Macron doesn’t. The president sees the arrivals as a chance to regenerate France, particularly, as he said in 2022, in ‘rural areas, which are losing population’.
Perhaps then Melenchon has done France a favour with his frankness. The left and centre will find it far harder to shut Zemmour down with shrieks of ‘racist’ when he next broaches the subject. Instead, they will have to engage him in debate. After all, how can the Great Replacement be a figment of the far-right’s imagination when the leader of the left appears to rejoice in its existence?
« Alors oui, Monsieur Zemmour, il y a un grand remplacement. Oui, Monsieur Bayrou, il y a un grand remplacement. Quel est ce remplacement ?
— La France insoumise (@FranceInsoumise) January 31, 2025
Ce remplacement, c'est celui d'une génération qui vient après l'autre et qui ne ressemblera jamais à la précédente. » – @JLMelenchon… pic.twitter.com/aRFGD9c0Kq
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