LE BOURGET, France (AP) — Young fans wore his name on their backs like that of a football star, above the number 27. They sang of fanfares and of revolution. Many spent the fall protesting or blocking their schools.
Then I entered Jean-Luc Mélenchon: 75 years old, his fourth presidential campaign and old enough to be their grandfather.
“I only have one sensible thing to propose,” he declared on Saturday in front of 20,000 supporters in a vast hall north of Paris. “Everything must change.”
The septuagenarian may never get another chance. Three presidential candidacies ended before the second round. In 2022, only 421,308 votes kept him out. Today, benefiting from renewed support, he envisages a win-win confrontation with Marine Le Pen, far-right candidate.
This bespectacled, burgeoning and seemingly tireless leftist wants more than the presidency. He wants to rewrite the rules of the French republic – invoking the unfulfilled promise of the 1789 Revolution.
Win or lose, his race could shake up France.
A place in the second round on May 2 could prove a cruel reward. If Le Pen defeats him, the anti-capitalist who spent half a century fighting the far right could help give it what it has never won: the Elysée – and command of France’s nuclear arsenal.
A victory could cause shock waves across the Atlantic. Trump would still be in the White House. Russia is waging a war in Ukraine. Yet Mélenchon wants to remove the EU’s only nuclear power from NATO, starting with its military command. His debt plans could also put France on a collision course with the European central bank, which would shake markets.
His detractors see this as the greatest danger. They accuse him of stirring up unrest and anti-Semitism, of despising the police and the press and of being lenient towards Moscow – accusations which he rejects.
“Left-wing Trump”
Born in Tangier, Morocco, in 1951, the showman was a Trotskyist student, then a socialist for three decades, before becoming a senator and deputy minister. In 2008, he retired to create his own movement.
Even its gatherings have a name: the “Mélenshow”. On Saturday, cameras scanned the crowd via cables as a film followed a woman through life’s difficulties. One by one, his lieutenants propose solutions. It was an election rally organized under the banner of a government-in-waiting.
Modesty is not his style. Backstage, behind a black curtain, he stopped to listen to the roar.
“Enjoy it,” he told French media. “It’s not often in life that you see something like this.”
He then recalls a 1972 rally where the socialist François Mitterrand and the communist Georges Marchais shared the stage. But this time, Mélenchon boasted: “I do this alone!”
He even insulted former socialist president François Hollande, who gathered in the same room to come to power: “They only filled a third of the room,” he said.
For some, these boasts had a Trumpian ring to them: the US president also boasted about the size of his crowd – and once declared: “Only I can fix it.” A far-right mayor called Mélenchon the “Donald Trump of the left.”
When the police searched his party’s premises in 2018, he shouted at them: “I am the Republic! He was later found guilty of this confrontation.
An investigative book from 2025 describes a leader who demands blind dedication and treats doubters as traitors.
Surfing the protests
His 2027 bet is on young people and the suburbs.
Le Bourget is located in Seine-Saint-Denis, the poorest department in mainland France. On the far right, he symbolizes crime and failed immigration. For Mélenchon – a white veteran of the old left – he represents the future: a younger and more diverse “New France” whose votes could bring him to power.
The room fell silent in memory of Pengo Bossio Wangi, a 26-year-old Frenchman of African descent who was killed last month in what the government called a racist terrorist attack.
Since September, a high school protest movement against the collapse of schools and the shortage of teachers has swept France. Police made thousands of arrests. Mélenchon adopted it from the start.
“Don’t touch our young people,” he warned the government.
“We are the future and he listens to us,” said Jamal Santos, 22, a student whose group joined the protests.
Last month, protests against the high cost of living turned into looting and arson in more than 20 cities. Rioters set fire to the 19th-century Limoges town hall. Le Pen accused her party of plunging France into chaos. Mélenchon blamed police tactics and denied his party organized the protests.
The old French political order is collapsing.
Socialists and conservative Republicans, who have traded power for decades, won just 6.5% of the vote in the first round of the 2022 presidential vote.
Now a Le Pen-Mélenchon runoff could leave both parties watching from the sidelines as two movements that have never governed France fight for the presidency.
Mélenchon is quick to accumulate this energy before his main rivals regroup. Former center-right prime minister Édouard Philippe is also in the running to take on Le Pen. If the center unites or voters come together to prevent a runoff between the extremes, second place could slip away.
“Everything must change”
Mélenchon’s program, more than 1,000 points long, reads like a project for another country. He would lower the voting age to 16, reduce retirement to 60, make the rich pay more and impose a moratorium on artificial intelligence.
At its heart is a new constitution to replace the Fifth Republic founded by Charles de Gaulle in 1958.
It would ask a special assembly of citizens, excluding current lawmakers, to draft a new constitution that voters could approve. And between elections, ordinary French people could gather signatures to force votes to overturn laws, change the constitution or even oust a sitting president.
“It’s not 1958 anymore,” says Hicham En-Naji, 27.
Insubordinate
Few French politicians inspire such devotion, or such fury.
He has made Gaza a rallying cry for youth, insisting Saturday that “genocide must be called genocide.” Activists who accuse him of fanning anti-Semitism, an accusation he denies, disrupted the gathering with whistles.
“Some commentators advise me to tone it down,” he said. “I won’t do that.”
He concluded by transforming a well-known gaffe by President Emmanuel Macron in 2017 about “people who are nothing” into a phrase from “The International,” the historic anthem of communists and socialists around the world.
“Macron told you that you are nothing,” he said. “Then let’s be all!”
The audience responded by singing “La Marseillaise”.
Whether teenagers wearing the number 27 remember him as the man who finally took his revolution to the Elysée, or the one who held the door open to the far right, perhaps it comes down to the one thing he refuses to do: soften.
___
Associated Press reporter Jade Le Deley contributed to this report.
Gn world
