A Mélenchon vs. Macron Runoff Would Be Good for France

Jean-Luc Mélenchon is a flawed candidate.

At 70 years old, he’s running a third consecutive time for president. Over the last five years, the strategy of his left populist party, La France Insoumise, has veered wildly, alternating between ambitions of annihilating competition from other left-wing parties to forming electoral alliances with them, squandering the momentum and goodwill of his 2017 campaign in the process. His party suffers from a lack of internal democracy. His fiery personality still turns off many would-be voters.

Yet, as a masterful and seasoned campaigner defending a platform with popular ideas, the member of parliament from Marseille has been surging in the polls. What’s more, as the candidate predicted last fall, the division on the right has opened the door for what once seemed a highly improbable scenario: As the first round approaches on April 10, Mélenchon now appears to be the only candidate with a real shot of disrupting a second-round rematch between incumbent French President Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen of the far-right National Rally party. At around 16 percent in the polls, he trails Le Pen by roughly 6 percentage points.

Mélenchon’s presence in the second round would refocus the national debate on the climate crisis and economic issues rather than immigration and identity.

The stakes are clear: If Mélenchon does manage to sneak into the runoff round, it would be a sorely needed shot-in-the-arm for the country’s weakened progressive forces and a refreshing development for the French political climate at large. The other left and center-left parties have been unwilling to throw their support behind him for a laundry list of reasons, but that doesn’t change the bigger picture: Even if a victory over Macron is highly unlikely, Mélenchon’s mere presence in the second round would bring benefits by refocusing the national debate on the climate crisis and bread-and-butter economic issues rather than immigration and identity.

Unlike Macron and Le Pen, Mélenchon supports a hike in the minimum wage—to €1400 (or $1,527) a month—and a return of the wealth tax the incumbent famously repealed in his very first year in office. He also wants to lower the retirement age from age 62 to age 60, a sensible proposal that acknowledges the value of leisure time and has the added benefit of fighting unemployment.

On climate policy, the left populist’s platform acknowledges the severity of the crisis: He has a massive €200 billion (or $218 billion) green investment plan underpinned by a constitutional amendment that commits governments to protecting biodiversity and combating climate change. Meanwhile, his proposal to form a constituent assembly tasked with forging a Sixth Republic is a similarly serious attempt to tackle the legitimacy crisis facing French democracy.

It would eliminate the ultrapowerful office of the French presidency and return the country to a parliamentary system elected by proportional representation. France’s political institutions are in need of renewal: If the polls are any indication, the vote on April 10 could feature one of the lowest turnout rates of any presidential election in the history of the Fifth Republic, founded in 1958.

Mélenchon’s views on foreign policy—which can be summed up by the idea of nonalignment, a tradition that harkens back to former French President Charles de Gaulle—have come under fire, especially in recent weeks. It’s true that the candidate has previously downplayed the dangers of Russian military aggression (especially in Syria), and his opponents have understandably seized on that. But the notion that he is politically aligned with Russian President Vladimir Putin is laughable: Mélenchon has firmly criticized the invasion of Ukraine from day one, and he dedicated a landmark campaign speech to the Ukrainian resistance.

His stance is leaps and bounds from Le Pen’s, whose party has taken out a €9 million (or $9.95 million) loan from a Russian bank and more recently instructed activists to toss out campaign literature that featured a photo of her shaking hands with the Russian dictator from 2017—printed just before the war to show off her foreign-policy bona fides.

A year after Le Pen was posing in the Kremlin, Mélenchon went to Moscow to visit Sergei Udaltsov, a Putin critic and leader of Russia’s Left Front movement who has since spent years in prison. Mélenchon does believe it’s smart to maintain dialogue with a major nuclear power at war, even if the invasion itself is an atrocity. But this is hardly different from Macron’s approach.

It’s far from the central focus of his campaign, but Mélenchon has also defended a tolerant and open-minded vision of French identity. Amid increasingly toxic debates over Islam and its compatibility with the country’s secular tradition—an era in which the “great replacement” conspiracy theory is referenced by even mainstream conservatives—he has called on the press and politicians alike to stop demonizing Muslims.

When discussing immigration, Mélenchon has borrowed from the Caribbean poet Édouard Glissant and his concept of “creolization,” embracing the fact that France is inhabited by people with origins from around the world. This is a simple way of acknowledging the fact that France today is a multiethnic democracy—a reality to be celebrated, not shunned.

Very concretely, it could help change the balance of forces in the French Parliament. Even if Macron wins the presidency, his agenda could potentially be hampered by cohabitation—a scenario where the president lacks a legislative majority and must share power with a prime minister from a different party. (This happened twice under President François Mitterrand and, most recently, under Jacques Chirac.)

If Mélenchon made the runoff, it would likely give a boost to La France Insoumise and other left-wing parties in June’s legislative elections. More representation in the National Assembly would translate into more leverage overall on the executive branch, weighing on the rhetoric and policies from the Élysée Palace over the next presidential term.

Of course, the ultimate goal would be the formation of a left-wing governing majority, forcing the president into cohabitation with a left-wing prime minister and a left-wing cabinet accountable to the National Assembly. This would be the supreme prize—still unlikely but just slightly more within the realm of possibility if the left makes it into the runoff round.

If Mélenchon beats out Le Pen, it would also send a much broader message to the political and media establishment: Despite the seemingly relentless rightward drift in discourse over the last few years, a large swath of the French population still believes in redistributive economics and progressive social policies.