Jean-Luc Mélenchon, what are you doing here? In 2019, essayist Giuliano da Empoli, former advisor to former center-left Prime Minister Matteo Renzi, published The Chaos Engineers, whose pocket edition (Gallimard) was released in March in France. In Italy, with Matteo Salvini or Beppe Grillo, he is well placed to study the rise of populists with a nationalist tendency and to question democracy in the age of social networks and big data, Facebook and Google. His remarks lead him to mention several other leaders, the American Donald Trump, the Brazilian Jair Bolsonaro, the Hungarian Viktor Orban. The name of Jean-Luc Mélenchon is never mentioned. However four years later, (re)reading da Empoli’s book, after the dark month of October 2023 marked by the Israeli drama, leads to this striking conclusion: the leader of LFI, who has not given up exercising power despite three unsuccessful attempts, switched to this camp. Although he rejects any nationalist reading of events, Jean-Luc Mélenchon has adopted all the codes dear to today’s populists.
First stage, October 7, the day of the massacre of hundreds of Israelis by Hamas: while the LFI leader is moved by “the violence unleashed against Israel and in Gaza”, the deputies of his party evoke “the armed offensive of Palestinian forces led by Hamas” which “comes in a context of intensification of the Israeli occupation policy”. No need to look for the slightest trace of a condemnation of Hamas, there is none. Louis Boyard goes so far as to write, as a first reaction: “For too long has France turned a blind eye to colonization and abuses in Palestine. Too long has France returned back to back the violence of the Israeli State and that of groups armed Palestinians.” No matter the outraged reactions, the main thing from this moment on is to stand together. “The tensions they [les leaders populistes] produced at the international level are the illustration of their independence, and the fake news, which punctuates their propaganda, the mark of their freedom of spirit”, notes Giuliano da Empoli.
The explosion at Al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza on October 17 marks another turning point. “A lie can travel around the Earth in the time it takes for the truth to put on its shoes,” said Mark Twain. In a first impulse, undoubtedly guided by their good faith and their ideological prism, the leaders of LFI follow one another on to massacre families” (Thomas Portes) and repeat a formula over and over again, “the Israeli army is now bombing hospitals” (Hadrien Clouet). Then the investigations multiplied which shifted responsibility away from Israel and implicated a Palestinian rocket – on the LFI side, nothing, radio silence, everyone stuck to the first version.
We are at the heart of the “new Carnival” described by da Empoli, which is based on “a logic more focused on narrative intensity than on the accuracy of the facts”. And the essayist quotes the American alternative right blogger Mencius Moldbug: “Anyone can believe in the truth, while believing in the absurd is a true demonstration of loyalty. And he who has a uniform, has an army .” This is another essential cog in the populist mechanism: never back down, never apologize to unite around yourself all those who want to believe a version, whatever the facts.
The aggressive buzz, to fuel the rage
Third stage: Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s remarks, on October 22, on Yaël Braun-Pivet’s trip to Israel, with as illustration a photo of pro-Palestinian demonstrators in Paris: “Here is France. Meanwhile Madame Braun-Pivet is camping in Tel Aviv to encourage the massacre. Not in the name of the French people!”
Leaving aside the use of the verb camp, here is the leader of LFI who opposes the real France to the President of the National Assembly via a tweet and thus sweeps away all representative democracy. Da Empoli noted: “This action is naturally populist because, like social networks, it does not support any type of intermediation and places everyone on the same level, with a single parameter of judgment: likes.” This tweet from Mélenchon has been seen… 14 million times, and he, who wants to be Mitterrand’s heir, begins to expound on his blog about the number of his “views”: “More than twice an 8 p.m. news of TF1. I thus believe that I have been heard while maintaining control of my agenda and my expression.”
This weekend’s tweets dedicated to the pro-Palestinian demonstration in Paris have once again shown that the aggressive buzz and the technique of political clashes constitute a fundamental pillar of the Insoumis method: they fuel rage. “By cultivating the anger of each person without worrying about the coherence of the whole, the algorithm of the chaos engineers dilutes the old ideological barriers and rearticulates the political conflict on the basis of a simple opposition between the people and the elites” , recalls da Empoli, who also quotes Peter Sloterdijk: no one manages the anger that men accumulate anymore, neither the Catholic religion, nor the classical left.
The violence of tone – we remember the verbal and symbolic excesses of LFI during the pension reform – is therefore used to convey the message that populist leaders want to convey, much more important than this or that specific measure: “Vote for them means slapping the rulers.”
Hallali as a springboard
Will the month of October leave its mark in the polls? 71% of respondents, questioned by CSA, now affirm that “Jean-Luc Mélenchon is a danger for the Republic”. In the monthly Elabe barometer for The echoes, he fell to 18th place among personalities, while he came second, just behind Edouard Philippe, after the presidential election last year. He is the second most divisive personality behind Eric Zemmour. According to the Odoxa-Mascaret October barometer for LCP, Public Senate and 20 titles from the regional daily press, published last Tuesday, the leader of La France insoumise is the most hated political figure in France, with 62% of French people saying above all feeling “rejection towards him” (+4 points), in front of Eric Zemmour. But a survey carried out by the Cluster17 Institute for Point shows that Mélenchon remains the one who “best embodies the left”.
While Marine Le Pen has moved since 2022, in the words of Raphaël Llorca, “from shock to soft”, Jean-Luc Mélenchon knows what he is doing, he who calls the desired chaos “citizen revolution”. Already in 2010, he explained in the columns of L’Express: “I no longer want to defend myself from the accusation of populism. It’s the disgust of the elites – do they deserve better?”
Its 2023 strategy aims to address the angry popular electorate rather than the middle and upper classes: above all, keep in touch with the former, even if it means moving away from the latter, supposed to be more easily recoverable in the last line right preceding a presidential election. With an important precision of staging: “Hold on despite the unanimity against us”, to use the expression of a close friend. Who concludes: “I think we will come out of this sequence strengthened from the point of view of our objectives.” Hallali as a springboard…
Chance has no place, and the attitude of recent weeks is part of a broader pattern, but no less precise. The Insoumis agree, their criticism of institutions and the current practice of power can be assimilated to “a form of dégagisme” (“Let them all go away!”, according to the title of an essay by Mélenchon published in 2010). It must also serve to bring back to the polling stations citizens who have moved away because they did not consider that their ballot would change the situation. “Let me be the standard bearer of your anger”: it could be Mélenchon. It was Trump, as he embarked on the conquest of the White House.
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