Jean-Luc Mélenchon

He was a senator, a minister delegate for vocational education, a member of the European Parliament and a National Assembly deputy until 2022. He is named as a candidate for President of France in the 2027 election, for which he announced his candidacy in 2026.

Career

Wikipedia says Mélenchon studied philosophy and modern letters at the University of Franche-Comté and worked as a teacher and journalist. He belonged to the Trotskyist OCI from 1972 to 1976, joined the Socialist Party in 1976 and left it in 2008. He was a senator for Essonne (1986-2000 and 2004-2010), minister delegate for vocational education (2000-2002), MEP (2009-2017) and deputy for Bouches-du-Rhône (2017-2022). He founded the Party of the Left in 2009 and La France Insoumise in 2016. In presidential elections he won 11.1% in 2012, 19.6% in 2017 and 21.95% in 2022, third place, just short of the runoff.

Positions

Wikipedia describes him as a democratic socialist and left-wing populist and a critic of neoliberalism. His platform, as it reports it, calls for a Sixth Republic, redistribution of wealth, expanded workers' rights, environmental protection, renegotiation of European Union treaties and withdrawal from NATO. His movement, La France Insoumise, is the main force of the radical left in France, and he is opposed in 2026 by Social Democrats such as Raphaël Glucksmann, who has said he would never again make an agreement with him.

Controversies

In October 2018 investigators searched the headquarters of La France Insoumise as part of two Paris preliminary investigations, one into the 2017 campaign accounts and one into the employment of European Parliament assistants. Public Sénat reports that Mélenchon resisted the search before cameras and was seen pushing a prosecutor's representative and a police officer. On 9 December 2019 the Bobigny court convicted him of rebellion and provocation and gave him a three-month suspended prison sentence and an 8,000 euro fine. Four associates were fined and one deputy was acquitted. The report I read does not state whether an appeal followed.

Summarised automatically from the linked sources. Wikipedia (English) · Wikipédia (français) · Public Sénat · LCP

Photo: jlm2017.fr, CC BY 4.0, Wikimedia Commons (cropped)