Mélenchon’s The One!

George’s Political Blog is proud to make its first endorsement. In the first round of the upcoming French presidential election, it will be rooting for Jean-Luc Mélenchon, MEP for the Left Party, candidate of the Left Front, and compulsive blogger.

The decision was an easy one. Apart from two Trotskyist nobodies who will struggle to poll one percent of the vote, Mélenchon is the only candidate in the race who opposes both Europe’s neoliberal economic consensus and the racist demagoguery of the Sarkozy regime. Mélenchon is an old-school French socialist, whose rhetoric is infused with that secularism and universalist republicanism that makes France exceptional among the world’s nation-states. Having served as a minister in the Jospin government (1997-2002), he split from the Socialist Party in 2008, taking another Socialist MP and a Green MP with him to form the Left Party, which forms a part of the Left Front alongside the French Communist Party and a few smaller outfits.

 So far in the campaign, Mélenchon has tapped into the resentment of a large part of the French electorate (his polling numbers are now consistently in double digits and have been as high as 15%) at the injustice of the current culture of austerity emerging in Europe. His rise should be viewed as part of a broader trend across the continent, in which far-left parties are finding success when they ditch their ideological rigidity and adopt a non-specific economic populism. Die Linke in Germany, SYRIZA and Democratic Left in Greece, Left Ecology Freedom in Italy, and Sinn Fein in Ireland have all achieved results by this method. (If only we had such a party in Australia…) Best of all, if he finishes in third place ahead of the National Front’s Marine Le Pen (as polls are starting to show him doing), his performance will help to recalibrate French politics leftward and deliver a blow to the emerging European far-right.

In the second round, François Hollande is the choice by default. If France is forced to suffer another five years of the Bonapartist racist reactionary Nicolas Sarkozy, the heritage of the Revolution will be much worse for wear. But Hollande is a Blairite Third-Wayer, and needs a strong force on his left (in terms of both presidential voting and parliamentary seats) to scare him away from the political centre. For that purpose, Mélenchon’s the one!