On a rare holiday, on my first visit to Paris, I took the Metro from the modernist wonders of the 13th arrondissement to my next destination. Two stops before I was meant to get off to visit an art gallery, I saw an army of children with homemade placards and keffiyehs marching down the platform at Sully Morland. Instinctively inclined towards the idea that these rebellious kids could probably produce more creativity in one single protest than any art gallery could muster (a joke, kind of), I departed from my premeditated route and before I knew it, I was marching on the Bastille with tens of thousands of young working-class kids letting out their frustration and fury at an education system that was failing them and set only to worsen.
This crowd was a mosaic of multicultural France: white kids side-by-side with those from the Parisian banlieues whose roots trace right back across the Maghreb, Western and Central Africa, linking arms with teachers and trade unionists, making clear their opposition to the far-right National Rally (RN), current President Emmanuel Macron, and the ongoing acts of imperial violence in Palestine, Congo and Sudan.
More carnivalesque than a simple protest, this unleashed repressed energies from a generation of teenagers vilified by the press, forced into silos of demeaning desocialisation by social media platforms, and subjected to increasing impoverishment by a punishing austerity regime fronted by Macron.
The people have had enough
The ire of protesters’ antipathy: the French schooling system is in prolonged decay.
France has the highest class sizes in Europe; teachers are increasingly forced out of the profession by low pay, declining vacancies, and poor treatment, and the physical infrastructure that underpins French schooling is increasingly strained by dilapidation, infestation, and extreme weather conditions.
As William Bouchardon has noted in Jacobin, classes regularly miss teachers, there is a shortage of both school nurses and aides for children with disabilities and learning difficulties, and these realities are felt in racialised, working-class France. This is compounded by the reality that ministers contemplate further rounds of austerity as they defend, in the case of former National Education Minister Amélie Oudéa-Castér, sending their own children to private schools.
France, like so much of the world, is a country simmering with unease, class conflict and political polarisation. In Spain, the violent eviction and eventual death of Maricarmen Abascal was the catalyst for an unprecedented wave of militant national housing protests, sparking an early election initiated by Socialist Party Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez.
In Belgium, workers have fought and struck against exacerbating impoverishment and fiscal retrenchment. And in Brazil, millions have taken to the streets against the prospect of a far-right government led by Jair Bolsonaro’s son, Flávio. The world could be on the cusp of a sequence of global social revolt unseen in over a decade.
France Unbowed
One political project uniquely primed to take advantage of this radicalisation and polarisation is Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s France Unbowed Party (LFI). Founded ten years ago, the long product of a rupture from traditional French social democracy, LFI has become increasingly identified with the youth protests. Recently elected Mayor of Saint-Denis, Bally Bagayoko was subject to international acclaim, even compared to Spider-Man, for his brave defence of youths tear-gassed by the French riot police.
Bagayoko has also found himself under frequent attack by centrist and right-wing politicians and pundits, almost always with a deeply racist edge, such as the insults which saw him compared to a crack cocaine addict.
Similarly, Mélenchon faced political abuse since his resignation from François Mitterrand’s ambitious but eventually capitulating Socialist Party government in the 1980s. The LFI leader and long-time Presidential candidate was filmed sharing an intimate intergenerational moment with a student protester, made famous overnight for humiliating a journalist who tried to ask fellow protesters leading questions in the midst of the action.
Despite regular criticism of Mélenchon’s uninterrupted control of this start-up party, its rise to prominence is undeniable. As one keen observer of French politics noted to me, if you belonged to that generation of millennials increasingly radicalised by the 2008 financial crash and the attempts to manage it in the rich’s interests, in France, you’ve seen the Mélenchon project increase its influence, voter share and cultural resonance every single year since 2010.
In the 2022 presidential election, Mélenchon was a single point away from defeating far-right Marine Le Pen and making the second round against now-outgoing President Macron. In the 2024 legislative election, LFI was the largest component of the Nouveau Front Populaire, which won the contest and forced Macron to deny the democratic wishes of the French electorate by desperately appointing European technocrat Michel Barnier as Prime Minister.
Two years later, with Barnier lasting only months, centre-right politician Sébastian Lecornu now holds the role in alliance with the Macronists.
Mélenchon’s party has proven adept at exploiting the crisis of French neoliberalism, speaking to people’s anguish over the decimation of their living conditions, their increasing disenfranchisement, and a deep-seated feeling of alienation from the state, from nature, and from each other.
Anti-racism and Palestine
The party’s ‘A Shared Future’ (L’avenir en commun) programme which invokes the formation of a Sixth Republic which decentralises democratic control over society; guarantees the right to free energy and water in every household; and establishes ‘eco-regions’ geared towards protecting nature, agriculture and planetary life through ecological planning.
It is also a party which has undergone a profound set of ideological and moral changes since the turn of the decade. For example, in 2016, it would not have been a surprise to encounter Mélenchon and his coterie lauding the uniquely French brand of secularism, Laïcité. Whilst theoretically a paean to the history of French republicanism and the separation between church and state, in practice this state ideology has functioned as the basis for criminalising and defiling France’s large and diverse Muslim community.
A decade ago, LFI would have entertained this jamboree of racialised recrimination, entertaining Islamophobic policies such as the banning of the hijab. Today, Mélenchon’s populism has shifted, shaped by the rise of social movements in solidarity with Palestine, against racist state violence such as the police murder of Nahel Merzouk, and advocating a form of what the party describes as ‘creolisation’, the celebrated intermingling of cultures from across the world fundamentally changing the fabric of the French people themselves.
LFI has become a much more vigorously anti-racist and internationalist project. Among its senior cadre today, along with National Coordinator Manuel Bompard and President of elected representatives in the National Assembly Mathilde Panot, you encounter long-term anti-racist advocates such as the Gabonese-French representative of the Parisian 17th arrondissement Danièle Obono and Palestinian organiser and now LFI representative in the European Parliament, Rima Hassan.
This shift in policy and outlook also mediates a strategic recalculation. Partly because of the benefits of the French electoral system, LFI is actively geared towards building the core of its support base in the multicultural suburbs of France’s major cities. This is particularly the case among what party strategist Bompard has termed the ‘Fourth Bloc’ of young and racialised working-class voters who traditionally do not vote.
As the 2027 presidential election approaches, Mélenchon is consolidating his dominance over the left bloc in French society. With the Socialist Party now endorsing notorious centrist Raphael Glucksmann and the Ecologistes remaining divided over who they might break for, the LFI leader looks increasingly likely, according to polling, to be the principal challenger to Marine Le Pen’s violently toxic brand of far-right politics in the second round of next year’s election.
At last Wednesday’s protest, there were loud chants of ‘Mélenchon, Ballon D’or’ from the crowd of Paris’ youth demonstrators. A few days later, I spoke to a group of young men in their mid-twenties in La République. They were Mélenchon-sceptics but were clear they would vote for him to keep out Le Pen. For this historic figure of the French radical left, and this insurgent party of militants he has helped inaugurate as a model for left-wing politics globally, both dynamics will be essential to LFI defeating the far-right and implementing their programme when in power.
Jonas Marvin is the author of The Breaking of the English Working Class. He also cohosts Life of the Party podcast and blogs at Marx’s Dream Journal.
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Opinions expressed in this article remain those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The New Arab, its editorial board or staff.
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