Mélenchon's Run Could Reshape France or Boost Le Pen

A veteran leftist fills a giant hall

At a vast hall north of Paris on Saturday, young supporters wore Jean-Luc Mélenchon's name on their backs like a soccer star's, above the number 27. Many of them had spent the fall protesting or blockading their schools. Then the man himself walked in: 75 years old, on his fourth run for president, and old enough to be their grandfather.

"Everything must change," he told some 20,000 people. It's the heart of a campaign that aims to do more than win the presidency. Mélenchon wants to rewrite the rules of the French republic, invoking the unfinished promise of the Revolution of 1789.

He may not get another chance. Three earlier bids ended short of the runoff, and in 2022 just 421,308 votes kept him out. Now, with support surging, he is eyeing a winner-take-all showdown against far-right front-runner Marine Le Pen in the May 2 runoff.

“

Everything must change.

Business Standard synthesis

A prize that could backfire

There's a bitter irony in that scenario. If Le Pen beats him, the anti-capitalist who has fought the far right for half a century could end up helping it reach what it has never won: the Elysée Palace, and command of France's nuclear arsenal.

A Mélenchon victory would carry its own shocks. He wants to pull France, the EU's only nuclear-armed power, out of NATO, starting with its military command. His debt plans could also put Paris on a collision course with Europe's central bank and rattle markets.

Critics see those as the larger dangers. They accuse him of stoking unrest and antisemitism, scorning the police and the press, and going soft on Moscow. He rejects those charges.

The showman from Tangier

Born in Tangier, Morocco, in 1951, Mélenchon was a Trotskyist student and then a Socialist for three decades, rising to senator and junior minister. In 2008 he walked out to build his own movement. His rallies even have a nickname, the "Mélenshow."

Saturday's event had cameras gliding over the crowd on cables and a film following one woman through life's struggles, while his lieutenants stepped up with solutions. It looked like a government in waiting. Backstage, he told French media to enjoy the moment, saying people rarely see something like it in a lifetime.

Modesty isn't his style. He recalled a 1972 rally where Socialist François Mitterrand and Communist Georges Marchais shared a stage, then boasted he was doing this entirely alone. He also noted that former President François Hollande only filled a third of the same hall.

Some hear a Trumpian note in that. One far-right mayor has called him "the Donald Trump of the left." When police searched his party's offices in 2018, he shouted that he is the Republic, and he was later convicted over the confrontation. A 2025 investigative book described a leader who demands blind devotion and treats doubters as traitors.

Riding the protests and the suburbs

His bet is on the young and on the suburbs. The hall sits in Seine-Saint-Denis, mainland France's poorest department. The far right sees it as a symbol of crime and failed immigration; Mélenchon sees a younger, more diverse "New France" whose votes could carry him to power.

Since September, a high school protest movement over crumbling schools and teacher shortages has swept the country, and police have made thousands of arrests. Mélenchon backed it from the start. Last month, cost-of-living protests turned to looting and arson in more than 20 cities, and rioters burned the 19th-century City Hall in Limoges. Le Pen accused his party of pushing France into chaos, while he blamed police tactics and denied his party organized the unrest.

Meanwhile, France's old political order is coming apart. The Socialists and the conservative Republicans, who traded power for decades, won just 6.5% of the first-round vote between them in 2022. A Le Pen-Mélenchon runoff would leave both on the sidelines. Still, centrist Édouard Philippe, a former prime minister, is also chasing a place against Le Pen, and if the center unites or voters rally to block the extremes, second place could slip away.

A blueprint for another country

His program runs past 1,000 points. It would lower the voting age to 16, bring back retirement at 60, make the rich pay more and freeze the development of artificial intelligence. At its center is a new constitution to replace the Fifth Republic that Charles de Gaulle founded in 1958.

A special assembly of citizens, with no sitting lawmakers, would write the text for voters to approve. Between elections, ordinary people could gather signatures to force votes to overturn laws, change the constitution or even remove a president.

He remains unbowed. He has made Gaza a rallying cry for young people, and some activists who accuse him of fanning antisemitism, which he denies, disrupted the rally with whistles. He said some commentators want him to tone things down and that he won't.

He closed by turning Emmanuel Macron's famous gaffe about "people who are nothing" into a line from the "Internationale," telling the crowd that if Macron says they're nothing, they should be everything. The hall answered by singing "La Marseillaise." How the teenagers in those jerseys remember him may depend on the one thing he refuses to do: soften.