Mélenchon: reasons to be optimistic

Mike Phipps reviews Now, the People! Revolution in the Twenty-First Century, by Jean-Luc Mélenchon, translated by David Broder, published by Verso.

JULY 13, 2025

Jean-Luc Mélenchon began his political life as a Mitterrand-supporting Socialist. Since leaving that party in 2008, he has fought three presidential campaigns, gaining 22 per cent of the vote in the most recent in 2022. Unlike other European left-populist currents, his La France Insoumise (LFI) has shown real political resilience, rising from 17 MPs in 2017 to 75 in 2022. In the Summer 2024 snap elections, the party was the largest force in the broad-left Nouveau Front Populaire (NFP), which resisted Marine Le Pen’s far-right Rassemblement National and, to general surprise, became the biggest bloc in the French parliament.

Mélenchon’s rise has mirrored the decline of the Socialist Party, abandoning its early 1980s radicalism in favour of austerity and an unreconstructed militarist approach to France’s former African colonies. So unpopular was François Hollande by the end of his term in 2017, he became France’s first president to decline seeking re-election. Mélenchon’s 20 per cent vote that year built upon the 11 per cent he had won five years earlier, which was itself he highest for a party to the left of the PS for three decades.

But it would be wrong to see Mélenchon’s movement as just a refoundation of French social democracy.  In La France Insoumise’s analysis, argues David Broder in his Foreword to this book, the social-democratic left is now “a historically exhausted force wedded to a failed model of capitalist growth.” Now, the People!, he suggests, looks beyond that framework to the lessons of the French Revolution historically and the experiences of citizens’ revolutions internationally. This is reflected in Mélenchon’s enthusiasm for the Gilets Jaunes movement of 2018, a multifaceted and decentralised social movement which developed in opposition to a fuel tax hike, which “shows the spontaneous coming together of a diffuse ‘people’ which becomes such precisely because it recognises itself in a shared demand.”

LFI wants to generalise such processes into a citizens’ revolution, creating structures in which democracy can flourish and thus opening the way to a new Republic, to replace the current one imposed by General de Gaulle during the  1950s ‘Algerian crisis’. If this sounds abstract, it’s worth underlining that the movement has stood up for its principles in very concrete ways: for example, resisting the demonisation of France’s Muslims and characterising the explosion of the suburbs following the police killing of seventeen-year-old Nahel Merzouk in 2023 as a revolt against injustice. Mélenchon himself describes this response as one of the sequences of citizens’ revolutions against the Macron government, alongside the Gilets Jaunes movement and the mobilisation against its proposed pension reform.

Neoliberalism has abandoned democracy on a global level, he argues: Macron is just one expression of this new phenomenon – but a leading one. Accelerating globalization forces the system to attack the most the basic conditions of life and, to do so, embrace authoritarianism as its authority collapses. This applies not just to openly right wing authoritarians like Trump, but even figures like Macron, hailed by the media on his election as a “true liberal”.

One example of this was the French government’s raising of the retirement age without parliament ever getting to vote on it – against the opposition of millions of demonstrators, all of the trade unions and 90 per cent of respondents in opinion polls. “Even worse, in 2024, Macron refused to recognise his defeat in the early general elections which he had himself called.”

This anti-democratic behaviour is backed by physical force. Police brutality was legendary in the Gilets Jaunes protests: 32 people lost an eye and five had a hand torn off; 800 were jailed. Three demonstrators against the pension reform had a testicle amputated.

Mélenchon’s conclusion goes beyond France: “Social democracy’s commitment to the ‘laws of the market’ has everywhere transformed it into a zealous destroyer of the social gains for which it once fought.”

Some of Mélenchon’s global-historical analysis here is a bit indigestible. But his well-illustrated presentation of how capitalism is destroying the planet is probably one of the best you will ever read from an elected politician. Nobody could accuse him of underestimating the scale of the challenge we face, as he discusses the measurement of time, the planned obsolescence of consumer products – the average European throws away 18 kilograms of electrical goods a year – the noosphere, the monopolization of knowledge by large corporations, the advent of robotic pollinators to replace bees (an example of how the animal kingdom is being further subordinated to the drive for profit), urbanization, global warming and much more.

What solutions are proposed? Mélenchon wants “a formal reconstitution of the people as a political subject” via the convening of a constituent assembly. He believes that LFI has the programme to express the growing revolutionary movement in France: collective ownership, social solidarity, a new form of political governance.

Mélenchon’s analysis and platform are certainly radical. It is refreshing to hear parliamentary figures enthuse about popular uprisings and make the connections between France’s own revolutionary traditions and recent international processes, such as the Arab Spring.

Yet I was left wondering whether current developments in France fit the model. If the very different mobilisations so far were to coalesce into a massive grassroots movement, Mélenchon might rightly be hailed as the only mainstream politician to see the potential for this in existing disparate protests. But it is a big if. Popular protests against pension reform and those against police brutality towards young people of colour have different roots, and there are many on the left who would question the wholly radical credentials of the Gilets Jaunes movement.

Furthermore, Mélenchon’s remedies look pretty vague in parts. The need for new forms of governance is palpable, but how far should the French Revolution of 1789 be the paradigm? The emphasis here on virtue in politics – which  Mélenchon wrote an entire book about a few years ago – underlines the connection, but I was surprised by the lack of any reference to the Paris Commune as a model of popular participation.

Overall, it’s a highly optimistic book about humanity’s untapped potential. The continuing rise of Mélenchon’s movement is further grounds for optimism, particularly as the collapse of the Socialist Party might have led to a long-lasting fragmentation on the left. Instead, French politics currently poses the political choices that other countries face with remarkable clarity: an increasingly authoritarian neoliberal centrism that makes concessions to and paves the way for the very far right populism it claims to oppose. The alternative: a united left offering a different model of society and politics that can meet the needs of the overwhelming majority.

Mike Phipps’ book Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow: The Labour Party after Jeremy Corbyn (OR Books, 2022) can be ordered here.