Far-left presidential candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon has vowed to withdraw France from the NATO military alliance, while blasting both U.S. President Donald Trump and Israel over the conflict in Iran.
Appearing on public broadcaster TF1 on Sunday, the leader of the leftist La France Insoumise (France in Rebellion/LFI) party seemingly sought to stake out the most radical foreign policy positions in the race to replace President Emmanuel Macron just days after throwing his hat in the ring.
Mélenchon, a three-time failed candidate for the Élysée Palace, accused the United States and Israel of acting “without any international mandate” by striking the Islamist regime in Iran. He said that Jerusalem was “without a doubt” the aggressor in the Middle East and was also responsible for a “genocide” in Gaza.
Meanwhile, he vowed to be the spearhead in an international coalition with socialist Spain and others to form a “front of refusal” against President Donald Trump’s foreign policy and would seek to “distance” France from the United States militarily.
Going further, the 75-year-old LFI leader said that he would withdraw France from the American-led NATO alliance, telling the broadcaster: “NATO is useless, we might as well leave it. It only serves to put us under North American supervision, that’s all.”
Mélenchon’s appeasement stance towards the Mullahs in Tehran was mirrored by his stance toward the communists in Beijing, saying that France would “never wage war on China” if he became president. This would include if China invades Taiwan, which Mélenchon asserted belongs to China, despite the Chinese Communist Party having never controlled the island or its people.
The media blitz from the Rebellious leader appears to be a strategy of early consolidation, with Mélenchon likely facing the prospect of other notable leftists and liberals entering the race and vying for one of the two tickets to the second round of next year’s presidential election, with one ticket all but guaranteed to go to either Marine Le Pen or her National Rally deputy Jordan Bardella.
However, it will likely be an uphill battle for Mélenchon to convince the disparate left-wing factions to coalesce around his candidacy, with figures such as leftist-globalist Raphaël Glucksmann and French Communist Party (PCF) Fabien Roussel likely to vie for his share of the hard left and former Prime Ministers Gabriel Attal and Édouard Philippe set to battle for the votes of the Macronist liberal establishment.
According to an Ipsos poll conducted for La Tribune Dimanche this weekend, seven in ten French voters see Mélenchon and his hardline positions as a “liability” for the left heading into the election. Even among left-wing voters, 55 per cent said they viewed the former senator as a liability, compared to 39 per cent who view him as an asset.
While 45 per cent of respondents praised his oratory skills, 60 per cent cited his “comments which create controversy” as his biggest fault as a candidate.
A similar assessment was made by National Rally president and potential candidate Jordan Bardella, who said that although Mélenchon has the intelligence and political and linguistic abilities to put forward his leftist “vision of society”, he cannot “keep his cool” and is therefore unfit to occupy such a high office.
Bardella, who currently holds a commanding lead in a potential head-to-head matchup with the LFI leader by a margin of 70 to 30 per cent, added that he hopes that Mélenchon does not reach the second round of voting as it “is very important and necessary to have the strength of an election of choice, and not of an election of rejection of the other candidate.”
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