Jean-Luc Mélenchon, far-left presidential candidate and leader of the France Unbowed party, unveiled his vision for a multicultural, socialist France during his party’s conference in Le Bourget, outside Paris, over the weekend.
A Sixth Republic.
Mélenchon vowed to overhaul France’s constitutional settlement, known as the Fifth Republic, by establishing a “Sixth Republic.” Specifically, the 75-year-old candidate vowed “permanent popular sovereignty,” including lowering the voting age to 16, giving citizens “direct legislative power” through referendums, and permitting voters to recall elected officials before their terms expire, including the President.
Mélenchon explicitly praised Maximilien Robespierre, the revolutionary associated with the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror, during which tens of thousands were executed.
A New France.
Mélenchon hailed France’s changing demographics as a positive development and advocated for the “creolization” of French culture. “Modern France is a new world… It is the France of the creolization of all music and all cultures… Generations will always succeed one another. And no one will ever have the opportunity to sort through them,” said the far-left leader during his address.
He also used his campaign launch to defend birthright citizenship, stating: “For such is the French nation that it is defined neither by religion, nor by skin color, nor by anything other than the political will it forges around Robespierre’s maxim: liberty, equality, fraternity… The French nation was built around its State. It was built around a principle: everyone adopts it by receiving it according to the law of the soil: you are born here, you are French.”
Mélenchon further vowed to pursue and punish alleged “racism” through new and already-available legal mechanisms, and claimed that greater diversity was necessary to tackle racial prejudice. “To dismantle the mental shackles of racialism, each of us must experience the diversity of cultures,” he said.
The far-left leader also called for “cultural liberation” from so-called “fascist culture” propagated by Bolloré, a French conservative media conglomerate which owns CNews, a major French news channel.
Mélenchon’s Program.
Mélenchon also outlined key policies in his domestic agenda, such as freezing the price of essential goods, significantly increasing the minimum wage, indexing wages to inflation, abolishing private health insurance in favor of a government-run system, and ditching France’s nuclear energy in favor of wind and solar power.
On foreign policy, the France Unbowed leader reaffirmed his stance on France leaving the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), decoupling from the United States, and proposed deploying French ships to escort Palestinian flotillas. “With Lula’s victory in Brazil, the tenacity of Sheinbaum in Mexico, and that of the Spanish left, for example, a non-aligned bloc is becoming possible in the world,” said Mélenchon.
The first round of voting in France’s presidential election is scheduled for April next year. According to recent polling, Mélenchon is the most likely presidential candidate to face National Rally leader Marine Le Pen in the second round of voting.
