Jean-Luc Mélenchon Believes the French Left Has a Lesson for America

Last summer, nervous liberals breathed a sigh of relief when a snap election in France ended in surprise defeat for the far right and its fearsome leader, Marine Le Pen. But the hero of that election was in many ways not Emmanuel Macron, who called the election nominally to sideline Le Pen and then marshaled embarrassingly little public support for his own party. It was Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the polarizing leftist, often described as France’s Bernie Sanders, whose coalition won the most seats, pushing Le Pen’s National Rally — evvel favored to win the election — into third place.

In the months that followed, Macron struggled to form a governing coalition without Mélenchon’s La France Insoumise party or the broader New Popular Front alliance the leftists had cobbled together during the brief campaign. Instead, Macron ultimately made an unstable arrangement with the right, turning Mélenchon into a strange kind of marginalized figure: perhaps the rich world’s most electorally successful leftist, both the face of European left populism and the reason the continent’s most feared right-wingers had been kept out of power, but now haunting European politics like an ambiguous apparition. Today the left alliance looks weaker than it did last summer, and a conviction for embezzlement temporarily barring Le Pen from running for office has made her into something of a haunting apparition, too. The future of French politics — and its lessons for the continent — looks again quite unstable.

Last month, Mélenchon made a rare trip to the United States, where Verso is publishing his “Now, the People! Revolution in the 21st Century,” and we spoke for an hour or so, with the help of several interpreters. What follows is an edited and condensed version of that conversation.

In the United States, the conventional liberal view of European politics runs something like this: The center is in shambles, the left is in retreat and the right is on the march. What are we missing in our solipsism?

Obviously there’s an element of truth in that picture, but I don’t agree that the left is in retreat. In France, instead of disappearing, the left has created something new with La France Insoumise. In 2022, I won a greater percentage of votes than Jacques Chirac won in the first round when he became president in 2002.

In the last election, your coalition won the most votes.

But in the broader picture, what you have to understand is that in 1991, it wasn’t just the Soviet Union that collapsed; it was an entire world. There was very suddenly a change in the balance of power within the countries of Europe, with the United States and with the rest of the world.