The beginning of the rest of Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s life began on April 10, 2022, in the first round of the presidential election, although defeated, he smiled, satisfied with the rest of the left, humiliated, from the top of his 21.95 %. But that evening, exhausted by this third campaign, he asked to be replaced. “Do better,” he said. A few weeks later, he gave birth to the Nupes, an alliance of the left for the legislative campaign. What hadn’t he been doing there…
Even if he had the political intelligence to make the Nupes, this electoral agreement with very relative success has become his straitjacket, his impediment. The leader is no longer master of his palace, in competition with François Ruffin in the eyes of left-wing voters according to the Elabe Institute survey. It certainly remains the most presidential, but the plebiscite is no longer, including among its own rebellious voters. Here is a rival within his own political family, which has never happened since Mélenchon slammed the door of the PS in 2008. All those who embarked on his adventure followed him as one man or, failing that, , abandoned him.
Regret
He quickly regretted this distancing. This setback was too much. He wanted to gain height, believing that the left was not going to survive him, to come back better. “Retreating, not retreating,” he assured. But he did not see the National Assembly, split into three almost equal political blocs, now becoming a hotbed of political confrontation. The chef has ants in his legs, so he must‘to occupy. His blog is no longer enough for him, we saw him settling in a temporary office in the wing of the group of rebellious deputies, on the visitor balcony of the hemicycle of the Palais Bourbon during the debates on the pension reform that he did everything to influence, in the nearby cafés of the Assembly too. He wanted to be there, viscerally, to remind us that the rebellious paterfamilias remained. They all owed him something.
During his absence, appetites sharpened. It’s natural. Everything exploded at the time of the Quatennens affair. By defending his young lieutenant at all costs, despite the party line on violence against women, Mélenchon opened a third Pandora’s box: criticism from his own troops, openly, organized, collective. A beginning of a sling even. His closest lieutenants kept a low profile. When the group was made up of only 17 deputies, like five years ago, he could have extinguished the discontent, put down the rebellion, but there are now 75 rebels, the vast majority of whom he does not know.
“Jean-Luc’s influence has plummeted”
Against him, too, a small clan has formed. A collective against a single man. There is Clémentine Autain, often critic of the chef, always apart like François Ruffin, the free spirit, and his old friends, those who started the adventure with him and followed him against all odds: Alexis Corbière , Raquel Garrido and Eric Coquerel. He therefore put them on the sidelines of LFI. They are at least as numerous as those who defend it body and soul. And the rest of the group? “A soft belly, which owes nothing to the chief but to the Nupes, and which seeks to build its own political existence. In the Quatennens affair, they were against him, and during the pension reform, they were more with the unions only with him”, wants to believe one of the grognards of the LFI, convinced: “Jean-Luc’s influence has plummeted.”
What Jean-Luc Mélenchon did not see either, it is this glass ceiling which settles above him. He thought of doing as before, betting on the inability of the rest of the left to do better, on the absence of an heir, on the improbable resurrection unions. He wanted to replace everything but none of that happened.
“I have not changed my mind”
The left, including its new friends from the Nupes, saw in broad daylight the limits of its radical and excluding line, the one that staunchly defends the impossible – retirement at 60 –, the one that calls into question the institutions and that the popular territories abandoned to the RN are no longer of interest. And the Nupes would be, he believes, the essential base for a success of the left, a way for him to avoid the annoying question of the return of those whom his rebels love to judge for “treachery”: these center-left voters who voted for Emmanuel Macron.
In a response to L’Express published on his blog, the former candidate for the presidential election repeats it, as a commitment: “I said in all tones that I wanted to be replaced. For the elections. I have not changed my mind”, a-t he recalled, even affirming that his “role is different from now on”. His horizon today would not exceed the walls of the Institut La Boétie, the rebellious school he directs, and the pages of his next book, “the citizen revolution”. “I am not a candidate for the permanent candidacy,” he had sworn in Reporterre. The presidential? A priesthood! Please believe him today, but when 2027 returns, the love of campaigning just might change his mind. And Mélenchon knows it, he is the first: from a fall, we so often recover.