There is no denying it, he has a job, the boss of La France Insoumise. For his 3rd candidacy in 10 years, he has taken up a formula that works: the long march, a monster demonstration with thunderous speeches to harangue the crowd. He has the trade, and he has flair, Jean-Luc Mélenchon: he understood that the battle against his competitors on the left was no longer of any use, and that, on the strength of his steady rise in the polls, the important thing was now to do everything to be in the second round to challenge Emmanuel Macron.
To do everything is to address left-wing voters directly and seek to trigger in them a useful voting reflex. Concrete translation: Sunday, in the streets of Paris, it was no longer necessary to shout “Mélenchon President”, but “Popular Union”. This union that the leaders of the various left parties have been unable to bring about, this union that the incredible popular Primary has ridiculed.
Objective: the union of the left, therefore, but does the leader of La France insoumise give pledges to other left parties? No not at all. This is the weak point, the flaw of this strategy. Vis-à-vis the socialists, communists, ecologists, it is zero concession. He doesn’t even talk about their leaders, he completely ignores them. And rather than developing an open program, capable of attracting the voters of the other candidates, Jean-Luc Mélenchon knocks, he knocks harder and harder: against Macron, this “President of the ultra-rich”, against the bosses who own too much, against the market, against the police. Not sure that this violence is ultimately very profitable.
The left peaks in the polls
But now, he is like that Jean-Luc Mélenchon, he despises his neighbors on the left and he is convinced that radicalism can allow him to win. His goal: to transform the presidential election into a referendum against Macron. And does he have any voice reserves to have a chance of reaching the second round? That’s the problem. As we know, the left is historically weak: it peaks in the polls at around 25%. Short of drying up the Communist vote in part and the Socialists completely, which is obviously impossible, he has practically no chance of overtaking Marine Le Pen who, for the moment, has managed to dominate Eric Zemmour’s offensive and stands firmly on the second step of the podium.
But beware, this counter-performance of the left hides another phenomenon, also historical. If we add up the votes cast by the representatives of the parties known as government parties (La République en Marche, Les Républicains and the Socialist Party), we arrive, in most polls, at around 45% votes.
The protesting parties impose themselves
In other words, for the first time in the major election of the Fifth Republic, the protesting parties are in the majority in the opinion: Marine Le Pen, plus Zemmour, plus Mélenchon, to which we add a pinch of ecologists, plus Fabien Roussel, Dupont-Aignan and the two leaders of the extreme left, we arrive at more than one voter in two. In previous elections, the government parties had always been in the majority (narrowly in 2017 with 52% of the vote, and very largely in previous presidential elections: between 65 and 75% of the vote).
So, of course, this majority is purely virtual, no government agreement is imaginable between these extremes. But this figure, added to the probability of a high abstention on April 10 and 24, says a lot about the state of mind of the French people today.