Out of sight out of mind. Olivier Faure no longer really remembers the last time Jean-Luc Mélenchon wrote him a message, nor their last tete-a-tete. In December, “maybe”. The boss of the Socialist Party no longer tries to find out, sighs and almost gets angry when we talk to him about the leader of La France insoumise, when we ask him if this is the start of a divorce. The honeymoon that began with the creation of the Nupes is clearly over. “I don’t know what’s wrong with him, Faure tried to explain a month ago. The animal is injured…”
The tide turned at the time of the Adrien Quatennens affair, everyone agrees, including those close to him. For the first time in a long time, the Insoumis leader who tweeted to defend his lieutenant against all odds found himself isolated within his own organization, criticized by several voices on the altar of the fight against violence against women. Worse still, its most loyal soldiers let the criticism spread without flinching. “For the space of a day, he found himself totally alone in his own kingdom. He understood that he had been set back. Imagine the vertigo for him. So he decided it was time to regain control, for the better, but especially for the worse, “laments an LFI deputy, now in conflict with Mélenchon. Lonely once, then twice, at the heart of the pension battle, when the inter-union and the Nupes cursed him for having disrupted their strategy.
All those who sting him would be “extreme right”
Isolated and injured, Mélenchon attacked. “There is a rule of life with Jean-Luc: if you are not with him, you are against him”, explains one of his former friends. At the moment, and since it is repeated that Marine Le Pen is marching towards the Elysée, all those who sting him would be “extreme right”. In his entourage, it is thus considered that Fabien Roussel is a “red-brown” and that François Ruffin “should be careful not to become one”. As for the social democratic left gathered around Bernard Cazeneuve, who castigates the radicalism of LFI, Mélenchon predicts in a blog post published on July 15 a future similar to the Danish left, “in xenophobia”. “The left never goes through the ordeal remaining unscathed”, he warns, reminding the same of what has become of “the socialist Marcel Déat or the communist Jacques Doriot” – these two figures of the left of the 1930s who draped themselves shamelessly in collaboration.
His eruptive reaction against Yonathan Arfi, the president of the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions of France (Crif), who criticized him for his communitarianism and whom Mélenchon also accused – of being “extreme right”, is only one more example of his isolation. Mélenchon more readily evokes a strategy of self-defense, in response to the collapse of the Republican arch towards “the reactionaries and the far right”. “In the end, after Emmanuel Macron, it will be them against us”, he prophesied already in June 2021, convinced that he too could enjoy the Republican front during the 2027 presidential election. Mélenchon therefore wants to provoke fate, by pushing those who encumber him to the fault, whether it is the Nupes or the Social Democrats.
Will the Insoumise machine follow suit? Here too, the foundations are crumbling. “The period worries me, Jean-Luc worries me…”, pours out an elected LFI. Within the group of Insoumis deputies, three clans have emerged in one year of existence. There is the soft stomach of parliamentarians still little known, where “general consternation” reigns in the face of the chin blows of the leader. There are the slingers, Corbière, Garrido, Ruffin and Autain, who yesterday were suspicious of each other, but whom Mélenchon, by isolating them, managed to unite. There remain the zealous lieutenants, the new and young guard embodied by Manuel Bompard, Mathilde Panot or even Antoine Léaument. They still defend their leader body and soul, but some are reluctant from time to time, as during the Quatennens affair, or to provide after-sales service for his salvo against the Crif. “I’m lucky compared to your generation: I lived three of the four great seasons of the Fifth Republic. I know what can happen,” he repeats to them. Will they believe it for long?