Interference, disinformation, cyberattacks… For authoritarian regimes, all means are good to undermine our democracies. For several years, Nathalie Loiseau, former Minister for European Affairs and Member of the European Parliament, investigated and collected data on their methods. She made a book of it, The Invisible War (The Observatory, scheduled for release on October 26), in which she focuses, in particular, on those whom the Soviets called “useful idiots”. Not all are – far from it. But by their complacency, they all serve the great purpose of the autocrats: to weaken the democratic model. Like Vladimir Putin who, in France, has long been able to count on a first-rate “influencer”: Jean-Luc Mélenchon. Charles Haquet
Bitter opponent of Ukraine
“Jean-Luc Mélenchon embodies the left. He was able, as few had done before him, to rally around his name the main families of the political left, who came together for the legislative elections. Who says left says defense of human rights. Well, in principle. We cannot say that this is the priority of the leader of rebellious France. Human rights, he hardly talks about them, and for good reason.
We will quickly think that it is his visceral anti-Americanism, coupled with a militant Germanophobia, which often made him take the side of Russia without it necessarily being that of Vladimir Putin. Maybe. The fact remains that we heard him affirm in 2008 in Rouen, when he had joined the Communist group in the Senate, that “the Communists have no blood on their hands”, suddenly forgetting the dead of Stalin or those of Mao. The fact remains that he publicly called on Putin to “finish the job” in Syria, repeated the Russian logorrhea on the “neo-Nazis” in power in Ukraine and refused any aid to kyiv since the Maidan revolution and the annexation of Crimea. “Crimea is lost for NATO? So much the better,” he rejoiced in 2014. Seven years later and a few weeks before the outbreak of the war in Ukraine, he declared on December 12, 2021 on France Inter: “We has everything to share with the Russians. For me, Russia is not an enemy but a partner.” To the journalist who asks him about Russia, which is massing troops on the Ukrainian border, the candidate replies, sardonically: “Ah, she is massing troops? (…) All that is nonsense. At regular intervals, the Russians are showing off.” We are in December 2021 and there are already more than 100,000 Russian soldiers ready to enter Ukraine. A few days later, he wonders in The world : “Why should we guarantee the physical borders of Ukraine?”
It must be said that for years and especially when he was a member of the European Parliament, Jean-Luc Mélenchon has shown himself to be a fierce opponent of Ukraine. In 2014, when Euromaidan demonstrators, after having been severely repressed, ousted pro-Russian President Yanukovych from power in kyiv, Jean-Luc Mélenchon denounced a putsch. When the European Parliament condemns the persecution of the Tatars by Vladimir Putin after the annexation of Crimea, it votes against, because it considers the accusations “not very realistic”. The number of times he refers to the Ukrainian authorities as “the neo-Nazi government of kyiv” can no longer be counted, as when he points to “the barbaric acts of the Ukrainian army and its fascist militias”, in 2015 in particular . His relentlessness against Ukraine has no limit: in 2014, he opposed the scientific cooperation agreement that the European Union has just renewed with kyiv, on the grounds that it would be…” of a new provocation against Russia. This even amounts to encouraging the adventurous government currently in place in Ukraine with the participation of neo-Nazis and US agents” (1). So as long as the kyiv government was aligned with Moscow, we could cooperate with it. The day he tries to free himself a little more from the Russian yoke, Moscow must not be provoked. This is the whole point that Jean-Luc Mélenchon makes of the freedom of peoples.
“Ukraine, this country that has so much trouble being one”
But we must not believe for a single moment that he wishes harm to the Ukrainian people, quite the contrary! It is for his own good that he refuses him financial aid in 2015, because he “refuses to see him subjected to the yoke of the institutions of Brussels in addition to the IMF” (2). Who can believe it? Not many people in truth, since on his blog, he published on March 4, 2015 a text entitled “Before the storm”, where he salutes the fact that “Russia is a very great military power” and calls for “patience , the collapse of the Ukrainian economy, the disintegration of this country which has so much difficulty in being one, everything comes at the right time to who knows how to wait”. At the same time, he opposes the imposition of sanctions vis-à-vis Moscow. Similarly, he laments that France has given up delivering to Russia the two Mistral helicopter carriers that it had sold to him and which are falling very badly after the annexation of Crimea and the outbreak of the troubles in the Donbass. He describes the French decision as “unbearable betrayal”. We dare not imagine where we would be today if François Hollande had listened to the leader of the Insoumis and if the two French-made Mistrals pounded Odessa.
We would come to believe that the leader of the Insoumis loves Vladimir Poutine. Be careful not to commit such a crime of lèse-majesté against Jean-Luc Mélenchon! For years he has been trying to make us believe that he is not aligned with anyone and that in Russia itself he has chosen the camp of the opposition. However, it must be said quickly and not be too fussy. The Russian opponent whom Jean-Luc Mélenchon puts forward as proof that he is not in the camp of Vladimir Poutine, Sergei Oudaltsov, is all the same a fervent partisan of the Russian Crimea and Donbass. He now supports the “special operation” decided by the Russian president and hopes that several states, Russia, Belarus and “denazified Ukraine” can constitute “a Soviet superstructure”.
This is indeed the position of the Left Front party, this opposition party brandished by the leader of insubordinate France as proof that he is anti-Putin. The reality is undoubtedly more complex. The Left Front represents an opposition tolerated by the Kremlin and some of its members could well play on several fronts at once, dissidents exiled one day, returning to Moscow the next day without ever being worried. One thinks, for example, of Alexei Sakhnine, always in contact with European left-wing parties, actively engaged against Ukraine, hostile to the Maidan revolution, favorable to the Donbass separatists, critical of Navalny in Russia and Belarusian opponents, support for the yellow vests in France…
This is the party whose friendship Jean-Luc Mélenchon claims. When the opponent Boris Nemtsov is assassinated, Jean-Luc Mélenchon begins by sullying his memory by calling him “an enemy of freedom” and accusing him of anti-Semitism. When he is retorted that he is probably confusing it with someone else, his answer is laconic: “It’s possible”, even if he dares to use a lunar formula: “The first political victim of this assassination, it’s Vladimir Putin.” When, as early as 2014, the European Parliament became concerned about the first hassles encountered by the NGO Memorial in Moscow, once again Jean-Luc Mélenchon did not agree because “it is of course only a question of isolating a little more Russia” (3). There is no worse blind than the one who does not want to see.
Jean-Luc Mélenchon also recruits at LFI warm supporters of Putin’s Russia: Djordje Kuzmanovic, who has accompanied him since the adventure of the Left Party, served as his adviser for international affairs and set up a party office in Russia. He left LFI in 2019 and today displays a sovereignist line close to the far right. Or Andréa Kotarac, who was a regular client of RT France to defend Vladimir Poutine’s foreign policy there, was an LFI regional adviser and close to Jean-Luc Mélenchon, before moving to the National Rally. He had been invited in 2019 to the same international economic forum in Yalta as Marion Maréchal-Le Pen.
Subheadings were added by the editor
(1) Scientific cooperation agreement with Ukraine – Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s explanation of vote on the Buzek report A8-0039/2014
(2) Explanation of vote by Jean-Luc Mélenchon on the report by Gabriellus Landsbergis A8-0056/2015
(3) Prohibition of the Memorial association in Russia – Joint resolution RC-B8-0164/2014 – Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s explanation of vote