Left-Wing Politician Shakes Up France’s Presidential Race

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/16/world/europe/jean-luc-melenchon-france-presidential-election.html

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TOULOUSE, France — One man gives shivers to banks, businesspeople and the bourgeoisie. One man has been rising rapidly in polls, threatening the front-runners a week before the first round in France’s presidential election. One man has suddenly turned the French contest, locked for months between two favorites, into a four-man race.

That one man is Jean-Luc Mélenchon, admirer of Fidel Castro and Hugo Chávez, sworn enemy of NATO and high finance, and candidate of his own “France Unsubjugated” movement, who has been drawing tens of thousands to his rallies, especially the young, as he did here Sunday at Toulouse on the banks of the Garonne River. They came to hear a veteran French politician give them a dousing of old-fashioned Robin Hood-revolutionary rhetoric, with promises to tax the rich hard, give to the poor and start a “citizen revolution.”

The formula, delivered in fiery anticapitalist phrases, and peppered with learned philosophical abstractions, has put him within spitting distance of earning a spot in the election’s decisive second round on May 7.

“Mélenchon: The Insane Program of the French Chávez,” the right-leaning newspaper Figaro blared in a front-page headline last week. The candidate was delighted by this jittery jab.

“What is the liberty of the employee who is fired for not working on Sunday?” he asked the crowd, delivering repeated thrusts at capitalism. “What is the liberty of 120,000 families whose water is cut off because they can’t pay the bill?” His advisers depict him as a kind of French Bernie Sanders. Unlike Mr. Sanders, though, he has no vigorous party establishment to block his way.

“Masters of the earth, you have good reason to be uneasy!” Mr. Mélenchon yelled at the festive, youthful crowd on Sunday, some wearing revolutionary Phrygian caps, as he stabbed the air with his fist and paced back and forth on the stage. “Give it up! Give it up!” the crowd yelled, a message clearly intended for Mr. Mélenchon’s opponents.

“There must be decent salaries,” Mr. Mélenchon shouted into the microphone. “That’s why the minimum wage will have to go up!”

If this veteran of French politics — he started as a young Socialist senator in 1986 — pulls it off, France’s election could end up a contest between two radical outliers. Both Mr. Mélenchon and Marine Le Pen of the far-right National Front gleefully promise a top-to-bottom shake-up, rejecting the country’s European Union membership, blasting its budgetary and deficit rules, and injecting France with huge doses of public spending.

The prospect of a Mélenchon-Le Pen runoff, written off several weeks ago, no longer seems impossible. In a poll published in Le Monde on Friday, Mr. Mélenchon had pulled to within two points of both Ms. Le Pen and her nearest challenger, the centrist Emmanuel Macron, a former economy minister.

Mr. Mélenchon’s advisers speak admiringly of Mr. Sanders. Their candidate’s score among 18- to 24-year-olds has shot to 44 percent from 12 percent in one month, according to Le Monde. Among 25- to 34-year-olds it has almost doubled, to 27 percent. Analysts say Mr. Mélenchon has the momentum at a time when others, like the mainstream right candidate François Fillon, stagnate or fall in the polls. “He’s a total campaign warrior,” the political scientist Pascal Perrineau said.

Mr. Mélenchon has come so far so fast that the other candidates spent part of the last week attacking him for the first time. Even the widely unpopular incumbent, President François Hollande, called him “simplistic.”

But as Mr. Hollande’s mainstream Socialist Party has collapsed, Mr. Mélenchon, an ex-Trotskyist, has been the big beneficiary, making the Socialists look like pallid imitators of his own robust promises to cut back the workweek, lower the official retirement age to 60, raise taxes on the rich and hire many more civil servants.

What remains of the once-powerful French Communist Party backs him; Mr. Mélenchon is not unhappy. “Mr. Fillon reproaches me for being a Communist,” he said on Sunday. “It’s a reproach I find totally tolerable,” he said, mockingly promising the right-wing Mr. Fillon a “handmade electoral jacket” in a reference to a recent scandal over his opponent’s expensive clothing habits.

In a country winded by 10 percent unemployment, a plethora of unstable part-time job contracts for the young, a frozen job market and rising inequality, Mr. Mélenchon’s message has powerful resonance. His supporters — the campaign said 70,000 turned out Sunday — speak of him with a fervor that surpasses that of all the other candidates, with the exception of Ms. Le Pen.

Yet the racially diverse crowd at Mr. Mélenchon’s rally is nothing like the all-white, all-French one that comes to hear Ms. Le Pen.

“I work a lot and I’m badly paid,” said Inti Gomez, 40, who said he was a night receptionist in a Toulouse hotel, existing below the poverty line as he supports three on a salary of about $2,100 a month.

Although he works from 10 p.m. to 7 a.m. every night, he had come out to hear Mr. Mélenchon. “What’s really hard is this inequality that I’m forced to submit to,” Mr. Gomez said, bemoaning the fact that his education had gone for naught. “Change is possible,” he said. “I’m just taking advantage of this collective joy.”

René Amando, 60, said he had spent a lifetime working in chemical factories but retired early because his health had been damaged. “It’s his attitude of refusal,” Mr. Amando said, waiting for Mr. Mélenchon to appear. “There is such a huge split between the big financiers and the people, who get poorer and poorer,” Mr. Amando added. “He gives us hope for a new kind of society, a more socialized and humane society.”

When Mr. Mélenchon said that the “presidential monarchy must be abolished,” he was tapping into an old French revolutionary tradition, one that sees revolution itself as an inherent good. The revolutionaries of 1789 France created a kind of civic religion around their revolution; Mr. Mélenchon tries to do something similar. Even so, the crowd on Sunday appeared a little bewildered by his abstruse references to heretics who had suffered for their beliefs, his advocacy of an obscure Latin-American alliance he is keen on and his admonition to “not let anybody exercise police power over thought.”

It roared though when he attacked President Trump over the missile attack on Syria. “No Frenchman can accept a global gendarme who decided all by himself the good and the bad,” Mr. Mélenchon said.