Far-left leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon: ‘I am perfectly adapted to France’

Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the zealous and polarising leader of France’s radical left, is sitting sagely in a restaurant that resembles a mountain chalet yet is located in the cosseted 7th arrondissement of Paris.

The neighbourhood is an odd choice for the Marxist anti-establishment firebrand, but Mélenchon says he wants to show me specialities from the Jura region, where he spent formative years. I am slightly out of breath and feeling nervous, given his domineering reputation and his tendency to shout at journalists.

“You are not scared, that’s good,” he says with a touch of humour. Actually, a bit, I admit. “No,” he says, “that’s not the impression you give.”

Mélenchon is a force that cannot be ignored in French politics today because he is a leading leftist and a key antagonist of the ascendant far right led by Marine Le Pen. The far-left party he created in 2016, La France Insoumise (France Unbowed or LFI), is the foil to Le Pen’s Rassemblement National (RN) — formerly the Front National. Both tap into resentment of elites and promise a break with politics as usual, but they clash on the solutions to France’s problems.

The most gifted orator of his generation, the three-time presidential candidate is revered by young people, urbanites and many with immigrant origins, particularly Muslims. He is a rock star on campuses from Paris to Montreal. But outside his base, polls show Mélenchon to be wildly unpopular, with many seeing him as more threatening than Le Pen.

He has been the target of two foiled assassination plots and his country house has been ransacked. Critics condemn his LFI party for bruising tactics, and cast Mélenchon as a demagogue with little respect for institutions. Business leaders abhor his programme of punitive taxes and disdain for the private sector. Allegations of antisemitism have dogged him since he criticised Israel for flattening Gaza in response to the October 7 Hamas attacks.

Mélenchon has started on a glass of white wine, which he regrets is not Jura’s best. I order the same as he makes quick work of a small plate of charcuterie. It is hard to hear in the boisterous dining room of Auberge Bressane, but the quirky decor of wood-panelled walls and Burgundian crests makes up for it.

Life requires us to make stark choices. The bourgeoisie will have their backs to the wall — a fascist or Mélenchon

Despite the animus against him, Mélenchon came within an inch of making the presidential election run-off in 2022, just behind Le Pen. He is expected to run again in 2027 — although he shows a flash of his infamous temper when I inquire if he will. If leftwing voters again converge behind him as the best placed to make the run-off, then a duel with Le Pen (or her successor) would leave France with an impossible choice.

Asked later whether he risks helping usher the RN to power, he rejects the idea. “Life requires us to make stark choices. The bourgeoisie will have their backs to the wall — a fascist or Mélenchon,” he argues.

On the left, Mélenchon has largely squeezed out more moderate leftists, forcing the much weakened Socialist party to make Faustian electoral pacts with LFI to save seats. Lately, the moderate left have been mounting a comeback, but the toxic dynamic with LFI resembles the divisions wracking the left globally as it struggles to fight rising rightwing populism. Do voters want radical change or a more consensual agenda? Think Bernie Sanders versus Kamala Harris, but dialled up to France where revolution is part of the national psyche.

Mélenchon comes down on the side of radicalism. His vehicle is the LFI party that he rules with an iron fist, purging enemies who question him and defending embattled allies, such as a parliamentarian who admitted to slapping his wife.

Wearing his trademark red tie and a black worker’s jacket, the bespectacled politician launches into the conversation. Within a few minutes, he lauds Monty Python as Britain’s greatest 20th-century achievement (“Ah, I forgot the war”), tells me he feels “trans-age”, meaning not as old as his 73 years, and says he adores American science-fiction writers (“the literature of my youth”) despite long-held opposition to the US.

I tell him I may disappoint him since I am American, not British — “Too bad,” he responds. Mélenchon sees the US as a dangerous empire, opposes Nato and higher defence spending, and calls Donald Trump just as much of a threat as Vladimir Putin.

Our conversation is in French, since he downplays his ability to speak English “out of sectarianism”. And he refuses to drink Coca-Cola. “For me, Coca-Cola is the empire, so not drinking it is a personal discipline and it is also a good topic for conversation,” he jokes.

We’re meeting at a turbulent political moment. Le Pen risks being excluded from 2027’s presidential race after a court sentenced her to a five-year ban for embezzling EU funds. If upheld on appeal, it would knock out a frontrunner — which Mélenchon thinks would be “a radical upheaval” that would facilitate a leftist making the run-off. Le Pen’s likely successor, the 29-year-old Jordan Bardella, is a much less formidable opponent, Mélenchon says.

Meanwhile, in the US, Trump is fuelling a global trade war that could trigger inflation and recession. Although Mélenchon opposes free trade, he rejects any alignment with the US president. “The Trump effect will be serious in France,” he says, adding not without glee that a “social revolution could be inflamed by . . . the absurdity of US policy”.

Mélenchon orders the chicken with a creamy wine sauce and morel mushrooms, a dish typical of Franche-Comté. Again, I opt for the same thing. He says he loves mushroom hunting, explaining that once you find a good spot, you keep the location secret until you’re on your deathbed. “Ahhh, morels! I’ve got a morel spot in the Jura. You could torture me, and I still wouldn’t tell you where it is.” I convince him we should order Comté soufflés as starters. “It will take us three days to recover!” he protests.

Mélenchon says he agreed to dine with me despite my job at a capitalist newspaper because I am not part of the French media that he thinks unfairly demonises him. “We can still have a laugh,” he says. “Here, in this country, everything is tragic, everything’s dramatic, my every word is weighed, reweighed . . . It’s enough, you know.”

He is also here to promote the recent English translation of his 2023 book Faites Mieux! Vers la Révolution citoyenne (titled Now the People! Revolution in the 21st Century in English). It reads like a philosophical treatise crossed with a manual on how to trigger a revolution in which Mélenchon posits that rapid population growth, urbanisation and new human networks will bring an end to capitalism and “the productivist model of endless growth”.

I struggled with some abstruse parts of the book — chapters called “The New Space-Time” and “The Noosphere”— but the second half includes a pacier analysis of uprisings such as France’s gilets jaunes and the Arab Spring.

I ask if he fears readers will not understand his theories. “I don’t care, because that’s not the point — they need to understand!” he exclaims.

A former senator, member of parliament and junior minister, Mélenchon calls for taking on the oligarchy in the name of the people, battling finance and raising the minimum wage. His “fiscal revolution” would tax inheritances at 100 per cent if they exceed €12mn and impose a heavy wealth tax. Spurred on by his daughter, he also has a convert’s zeal on the environment: renewables should replace France’s abundant nuclear energy out of safety concerns, emissions should be cut far faster, and a right to healthy food and water be established.

In a sort of shadow “Frexit”, the one-time member of the European Parliament calls for “disobeying” EU deficit rules and regulations. Another cornerstone of his plan is for citizens to draft a new constitution to make French political institutions more democratic.

The Trump effect will be serious in France . . . social revolution could be inflamed by the absurdity of US policy

As she sets the soufflés before us, the waitress warns that the ramekins are very hot. Mélenchon groans: “Aie! That means they reheated it — not a good start.”

His parents were pieds-noirs from Algeria who moved to Morocco, so he spent early childhood in Tangier, leaving him with a love for the Mediterranean, a penchant for cultural mixing and an abiding affection for donkeys. “They are tragic! Have you ever heard a donkey bray?” When his family moved to a small town in Normandy, Mélenchon recalls being shocked by the rainy homogeneity of the place.

At university, he studied literature and joined the May 1968 student movement. Swept up in Trotskyist student unions — as an adult he would repeatedly visit the house in Mexico where the Russian revolutionary was assassinated — he believed socialism would come to dominate the world.

His love for politics reached back to the family dining table. “Everyone was talking about politics all the time. I have only political memories,” he says. After a brief stint as a teacher and a journalist, he threw himself into politics, later becoming France’s youngest senator, aged 35.

I ask if his childhood in Morocco made him more sensitive to the challenges faced by Muslim minorities in France. He is one of few politicians to criticise the discrimination they face and actively court their votes — something his opponents cast as a threat to social cohesion and a violation of France’s strict secularism, known as laïcité. “I had the benefit of never having a grudge to settle or being afraid of Muslims. In fact, it is the opposite,” he says.

He believes the left must be radical — the opposite of the social democratic left or “Third Way” politics espoused by Bill Clinton and later Tony Blair, which he says betrayed the people to side with big business and the wealthy. Frustration led Mélenchon to break away from the Socialist party in 2008 after more than three decades. He still holds it in deep contempt. “Conflictualité is the foundation of the left, of the historic left,” he says. “We were born in class conflict, because of class conflict, for class conflict.”

The chicken has arrived, its sauce dotted with morels. He takes a bite and nods approvingly.

Although Mélenchon says he opposes all violence in politics, he has infused LFI with a culture of permanent conflict. The party’s parliamentarians use rhetorical and performative aggression; its communications strategy is to never admit a mistake. During protests over President Emmanuel Macron’s increase of the retirement age, an LFI deputy posed for a photo with his foot on a ball plastered with an image of the labour minister’s head. To protest against Israeli bombing in Gaza, LFI deputies held up pictures of dead Palestinian children in France’s National Assembly. The tactics allowed opponents to paint them as extreme, even as Le Pen’s far right has sought to appear ready to govern.

I ask Mélenchon if his persona as the angry man of French politics is a strategy or just him losing control? “Both — I won’t lie to you. I have a volcanic temperament, that’s for sure,” he replies.

In one incident in 2018, he shouted at police who came to search his office as part of a financing investigation similar to the one that felled Le Pen. “My person is sacred!” he yelled. “La République, c’est moi!” (“I am the Republic!”).

Recent allegations of antisemitism have provoked his anger. Since October 7 2023, Mélenchon has refused to call Hamas a terrorist movement, sparred with France’s main Jewish advocacy group, and declined to attend a march against antisemitism. Critics accuse him and LFI of using antisemitic tropes in recent social media posts depicting the rightwing TV host Cyril Hanouna, who is Jewish.

Mélenchon says the accusations are unfounded and levelled by “ignorant or corrupt” people. “This pains me . . . being accused of antisemitism when I have always been an anti-racist. My life in Tangier surrounded me in a mix of cultures.”

Conflictualité is the foundation of the historic left. We were born in class conflict, because of class conflict, for class conflict

He adds: “I’m living through a genocide, I’m a French political leader. What am I supposed to do with that but condemn it?”

Mélenchon blames the media for “creating the image of antisemitism” against him to disqualify him from politics, particularly the rightwing CNews, a French equivalent of Fox News that is owned by conservative billionaire Vincent Bolloré

“All over the world, we are accused of the same things, in the same way,” he says of leftists facing allegations of antisemitism. “Just look at how [Jeremy] Corbyn was exterminated”, he said of Britain’s former Labour leader. “The drama for him was that he was under fire from the outside and the inside of his own party.”

I tell Mélenchon that I doubt he can win in 2027 if he does not put to bed the antisemitism issue, so he should address it head-on. Especially as his nemesis Le Pen has put him on the defensive by casting the RN as the best defender of the French Jewish community — a spectacular U-turn for a party founded by her father, a notorious antisemite.

“OK, thanks for your advice, I will try to elevate myself intellectually,” he says, cuttingly. “Can you admit you might be wrong, or do you think you’re right just because you’re a journalist? The one with 60 years of politics under his belt — that’s me. People who give in end up in the trash bin of history.”

His irritation flares again when I push him on whether he will run for president in 2027. “Ah, here we go again. But you’re not even being original — you’re the millionth person to bash my head in with this . . . I don’t have anything left to prove.”

Thankfully the tension dissipates when the waitress returns to ask about dessert. He opts for a Paris-Brest, and I go for a lemon vodka sorbet.

I am curious to know if he ever meets business people, many of whom fear he would turn France into a sort of Venezuela on the Seine. Ahead of last summer’s snap legislative elections, many CEOs said privately that if forced, they would pick Le Pen’s RN over Mélenchon’s LFI.

Mélenchon is carving up the choux pastry. While he chews, I say that I heard he lunches regularly with a high-level banker, whom I also know, and that they had strategised in preparation. It is the only time he appears a bit thrown off.

“Ah, I didn’t think he would tell you that. He was talking out of turn!” he laughs. Business is wrong to fear him, he says, since “for many of them, I would be a pretty good deal”, bringing policy visibility and cash to urgently shift to a green economy.

We are the only ones left in the restaurant except for the staff, who clearly would like to close. I have come to think Mélenchon is a character who could thrive only in French politics — an unabashed revolutionary who writes intellectual tomes and gives hours-long speeches before rapt supporters. He is as different as you can get from eager American or British politicians who aim to convince voters they would be fun to have a beer with. Yet I have thoroughly enjoyed our three-and-a-half hour lunch.

When I ask if he thinks a politician like him could succeed elsewhere, he smiles. “I am perfectly adapted to my people, my friends, and France. It is just that way. In what other country is the radical left manoeuvring to take power?”

Leila Abboud is the FT’s Paris bureau chief

Find out about our latest stories first — follow FT Weekend on Instagram and X, and sign up to receive the FT Weekend newsletter every Saturday morning