Was it just advice? The precept of an elder experienced in political exercise? Or more: a strategic shift? At the start of the school year, the deputies of France Insoumise listen learnedly to Jean-Luc Mélenchon during a meeting where it is a question of preparing the first battles in the hemicycle of the National Assembly. The leader delivers his analysis on the unprecedented political situation, born of the dissolution, on the “illegitimacy” of the government of Michel Barnier, elected from a right which is far from having won the elections. And this apostille from the leader of rebellious France in the middle of the meeting: “We can be radical without making personal splashes.” The leader’s words hit home. “It’s quite clear, isn’t it? We need to calm down. Well… Rather than some calming down, no one trying to be the star. The collective takes precedence”, sums up a deputy in hushed words. It is not a question of abandoning this radicalism, in tone and form, which has made the Insoumis what they are today: the driving force on the left.
An assumed, theorized radicalism – “to bring the anger of the people into the hemicycle”, Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s lieutenants have long defended – which made them successful with a certain left-wing electorate watching the last elections legislative, as much as it cost them among others. The legislative campaign in June was, for certain rebellious candidates, harsher than expected. In certain constituencies, we did not display the figure of Jean-Luc Mélenchon on the leaflets and we even preferred to enlarge the three letters of the New Popular Front and thin out the “phi”, the LFI logo.
“Many voters criticized us for messing up the Assembly, often wrongly, because the media had made it into a scarecrow and it had worked in people’s heads. It’s true that we had to do more education than usual”, concedes a rebellious MP on condition of anonymity. The assessment of the behavior of LFI elected officials under the previous legislature? Between 2022 and 2023, almost all disciplinary sanctions targeted them. Criticisms and sanctions that are a tad unbalanced, according to socialist deputy Arthur Delaporte, ardent defender of the union on the left: “The focus is on them. They are much more looked at than other Macronist parliamentarians who can insult at every turn in the field without anyone saying anything to them. At the end of the 1940s, the communists and the Poujadists were accused of the same behavior in 1956.
The Soudais case
So, do the words of Jean-Luc Mélenchon at the start of the 2024 school year mark a change in strategy? Certainly not, according to those close to him. “It’s a small tackle to those who left (Alexis Corbière, François Ruffin, Clémentine Autain, purged from France Insoumise, Editor’s note)”, translates an Insoumise, who adds: “The question of personal coups, it “is that of loyalty to the group, to the Insoumis, and how what one does can reflect on the collective.” Words which do not only target those who have left, but also those who remain and whose behavior has disturbed – “interrogated”, as we euphemize at LFI. In particular, the deputy for Seine-et-Marne Ersilia Soudais. Since August, the one that her rebellious peers readily despise by giving her various sarcastic nicknames has been in constant controversy.
On August 10, she declared that “France is an Islamophobic country” in reference to the ban on wearing the veil for French athletes during the Olympic Games. A few days later, another blunder: in a video posted on the social network TikTok, she presents one of her collaborators, Matthieu Garnier, hilariously, as “a harasser of journalists and incidentally responsible for communications”. The same one who had attacked journalist Lucas Jakubowicz on several occasions through various insulting public messages and other allusions to his last name.
A month later, on September 24, she stood out in front of the Paris police headquarters. She comes to the aid of Elias d’Imzalène, an Islamist influencer on file S, yesterday close to the networks of Alain Soral, who was placed in police custody after having called “to lead the intifada in Paris” during a pro-Palestinian demonstration on September 8. Ersilia Soudais then considers that he is being detained because he is “Muslim”. “It was stupid to go see him,” concedes one of her rebellious comrades, who defends her: “Ersilia is someone who is hypersensitive and thought he needed support.” And the same source adds: “There is an obsession with her, but it is not because she does something that all LFI does that same thing. What we are criticized for is not the form but our position on Palestine.”
Circumvolutions
Marie Mesmeur is not Ersilia Soudais… The first, an LFI deputy from Rennes, has benefited from a greater wave of support from her rebellious comrades in recent times. In a response to the communist Fabien Roussel who returned to the anti-Semitic attacks in the streets of Amsterdam during the football match between Ajax and Maccabi Tel-Aviv, she caused an outcry by writing: “These people (in reference to the Israeli fans) were not lynched because they were Jewish but because they were racist and supported genocide.”
Words castigated from right to left, because they thus suggest that the violent and anti-Semitic acts which took place after the meeting are justified in the name of the Palestinian cause and the ongoing tragedy in Gaza, while ignoring the anti-Semitic character however documented. The Minister of the Interior Bruno Retailleau announces that he is reporting these words to the courts under article 40. This time, Jean-Luc Mélenchon steps up to the plate in a video published on November 12 and defends his people. , the rebels who, he says, “feel in danger”. He denounces a “rotten” political-media atmosphere which is “created from scratch so that it ends badly”. “The rebellious deputies keep moderation in everything they say,” he asserts, but still moderates his troops: “We must play a role which consists, while maintaining the firmness of our positions, in not not participate in or take part in the escalation that our adversaries would like to provoke to the detriment of our country.” Waltz-hesitation…
LFI has not chased away its naturalness. It gallops along, depending on a few semantic and behavioral inflections. The horse is a little more held, short bridle. The communiqué of October 7, 2023, during the Hamas attack in Israel, left its mark. That day, the parliamentary group refused to describe the acts of the small Islamist group as “terrorist”, and even solemnized them as an “armed offensive by Palestinian forces”. For weeks, LFI was bogged down in legal debates over the use of the word terrorist. A year later, on October 7, 2024, there are still convolutions and the word that they did not want to use before: “In response to this terrorist act, the far-right government of Netanyahu launched a total war on the Palestinian people.”
In the National Assembly, LFI elected officials dance a tango, sometimes bourgeois, sometimes rebellious. Elected vice-president of the National Assembly, Clémence Guetté silences the rebellious deputy Louis Boyard for an off-topic in the hemicycle, and the president of the Finance Committee Éric Coquerel tells his young comrade Aurélien Lecoq to pull himself together, who accused the former Minister of the Economy Bruno Le Maire, interviewed that day, of a “thief”. To tell the truth, the political situation has changed. It is the NFP, where LFI is dominant, which now holds the majority (even relative) and has the most keys to making the law by trying to apply their program. “We are no longer just opponents, we must do, manufacture, build with all the more room for maneuver as the government is weakened and limited,” says an LFI deputy. This is how the budget presented by Prime Minister Michel Barnier was revamped from floor to ceiling by the union of the left, with a host of modifications undertaken by LFI and inspired by its program. The left also voted for this budget. His budget.
Face-to-face with BFM
The strategy adapts to political reality, but remains the same in the media field: a constant confrontation. There too, a strange tango between the Insoumis and BFM, in particular. The channel loves to invite LFI elected officials to debate sets – always vigorous – and they reciprocate it. A “I love you” is not the most political either. Once the show is over, the Insoumis produce series of videos edited according to the codes of social networks: musical design which reinforces the dramatic effect, rhythmic cutting only featuring the “punchlines” of the LFI guest, etc.
Wednesday November 13, after a controversy concerning the Marseille deputy Sébastien Delogu, his colleague and LFI number one Manuel Bompard resumes his intervention on the BFM channel and titles his edited video: “Reframing on fake news against Delogu”. On TikTok and Instagram, the same kind of videos of Insoumis correcting journalists are flourishing. The same day, it was their colleague David Guiraud, MP for the North, who lectured the 24-hour news channel on their coverage of the attacks which followed the football match in Amsterdam. The confrontation with the media is a political strategy like any other at LFI, and which is reminiscent of that which saw the Trumpists oppose across the Atlantic with the CNN channel and newspapers such as New York Times. The primacy of manner goes to Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who declared in 2018: “Hate of the media and those who run them is just and healthy.”
The American election was also closely scrutinized by rebellious strategists. While observers considered that the numerous excesses of the American candidate since his meeting in New York, at the end of the campaign, could have got the better of him, the exact opposite happened at the polls. A large part of the electorate has made up its mind in recent weeks, in full awareness of Trumpist words and excesses. “It’s not because you, observers, don’t like what we say and how we say it that it doesn’t speak to people or please them,” analyzes a Rebel. Proof by example?
.