French left looks to UK Labour as a model for booting out Mélenchon

French politicians used to think of their British counterparts trapped in a never-ending Brexit vortex as a cause for pity rather than a source of inspiration. Now at least some of them are casting their gaze across the Channel in their quest for political resurrection.
Center-left heavyweight Raphaël Glucksmann — who emerged as a possible national leader after a good showing in the EU election in June — this week urged the French left to get rid of radical left firebrand Jean-Luc Mélenchon and return to its moderate, social democratic roots, following the example of the Labour party in the U.K.
“By turning the page on Corbyn, British Labour allowed itself to turn the page on right-wing populism. We’re going to do that here,” the French MEP told Le Point, comparing Mélenchon to former British left-wing leader Jeremy Corbyn, who opened up years of devastating rifts on the British left.
The Labour Party won a historic landslide election last month under the leadership of moderate leader and now Prime Minister Keir Starmer, after being out of power for the past 14 years.
With talks to form a new French government officially starting this Friday after weeks of political limbo, pressure is mounting within the country’s left-wing coalition to break with Mélenchon, who is increasingly perceived by the moderate left as toxic and an obstacle to its rise to power.
The left-wing alliance, which is dubbed the New Popular Front and brings together Mélenchon’s France Unbowed party, the Socialists, the Greens and the Communists won a surprise victory in a snap election and now faces its first chance to exercise power in years.
But it would need to form a coalition with other parties that loathe Mélenchon, as no political force secured an absolute majority in parliament.
Mélenchon never ceased from escalating tensions within the already fragile pan-left coalition. Earlier this week, discomfort reached a new peak after Mélenchon called to impeach French President Emmanuel Macron. He has been a divisive on topics ranging from Ukraine to support for Palestinians.
The move to impeach Macron looks like it could prove a breaking point, however. It embarrassed all the other left parties, brought once again to the surface long-standing discontent against the radical left leader, and put the fragile alliance in danger.
On Friday and Monday, French President Emmanuel Macron will meet political leaders at the Élysée to test the waters on possible parliamentary alliances to give France a new government.
As tensions with Mélenchon’s France Unbowed mount, the moderate left is facing a longstanding dilemma.
If it stays in the alliance with Mélenchon, it will have little or no chance to win power as the Macron camp and other mainstream parties made clear that they wouldn’t enter in a coalition government that includes France Unbowed.
But the alternative raises other difficult political questions.
The moderate left is still barely recuperating from the near political annihilation that it suffered during Macron’s first term.
After the presidency of François Hollande, the French Socialists faced a dramatic decline which plumbed rock bottom at the 2022 presidential election, when their candidate, Paris’ socialist mayor Anne Hidalgo, received less than 2 percent of votes.
As the traditional left kept losing ground, anti-establishment Mélenchon became unstoppable. The hard leftist, who wants to “disobey” EU treaties and admires former Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chávez, got over 20 percent of votes in the 2022 presidential election (10 times more than the Socialists) and became the líder máximo of the French left, with his party leading the left-wing coalition in the French parliament.
Things started to look slightly brighter for the moderate left this summer, when the Socialists and Glucksmann scored better than Mélenchon’s France Unbowed at the European parliament election.
Still, when Macron called for a shock snap election in June, the Socialists and the Greens, too weak to fly on their own in France’s complex, two-round system, joined forces again with Mélenchon. The rejigged alliance pulled a surprise victory, winning the highest number of seats in the National Assembly, France’s lower chamber.
A familiar scenario quickly followed, with Mélenchon pulling inflammatory moves and more moderate allies struggling to contain him and raise to the occasion.
Many within the center left camp think Mélenchon is willingly sabotaging his own camp’s efforts to form a government and betting on Macron throwing in the towel and stepping down.
“The strategy of France Unbowed is to provoke a presidential election while our goal is to be able to govern … there are different strategies,” said Hélène Geoffroy, a heavyweight Socialist mayor and one of the leading figures of the anti-Mélenchon camp within the left.
This week’s coalition talks mark the left’s first chance to access government.
“Mélenchon once said ‘I am the sound and fury.’ But we don’t want to be the sound and fury, we want to change people’s lives,” she added.
That will sound familiar to UK politics watchers.
After a far-left campaign which led the Labour to a defeat in 2019 British election, then leader Corbyn stepped down from the party leadership, giving way to moderate leader Starmer, the current prime minister.
One of Starmer’s frequent slogans in opposition was that Labour was no longer a “party of protest” under his watch.
When heckled at the party’s manifesto launch in June by a far-left activist, Starmer said: “We gave up being a party of protest five years ago, now we’re a party of power.”
Mélenchon and Corbyn have much in common, noted Sébastien Maillard, a London-based advisor to the Jacques Delors Institute, citing “their opposition to economic liberalism, their strong support for Palestine and their ambiguity regarding Hamas, their accusations of anti-Semitism, their Euroskepticism.”
But, unlike Corbyn, Mélenchon still entertains very real hopes of gaining power.
Mélenchon’s France Unbowed is the biggest party in the left-wing coalition and, so far, he has proved to be the strongest leftist candidate in the race for the Elysée.
“The French left is a bit stuck,” said Mathieu Gallard, research director at pollster Ipsos, noting that other parties of the left-wing coalition can’t afford to break with Mélenchon’s party as “they don’t have any real alternative allies.”
“The problem for the rest of the left is that Mélenchon has a real base of popularity among part of the left-wing electorate, there are voters who are clearly behind him,” said the pollster.
But rebel socialists see things differently and believe that, if the moderate left starts defending its own political agenda, it will gain voters.
The moderate left would like to focus more on economic issues, job policies, and security, in a bid to bring the country together instead of fuelling divisions, Socialist Geoffroy said.
“The labourists did it quietly, calmly. They finally broke with the more radical positions and it worked, people trusted them,” as she put it.
Stefan Boscia contributed reporting.