The French election candidate softened his stance towards the end of the campaign, but in the end the skilled orator failed to muster enough votes

In the end, Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s 2017 French presidential election campaign ended like his previous gambit in 2012: a decent showing, a surge of support as the race tightened, but not quite enough.

For the first weeks of the campaign, Mélenchon acted like he knew he would never win. It showed in the shrugs, the barbed quips and acerbic asides, the to-hell-with-it “bof”, the Chairman Mao jackets and unabashed support for the late Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez.

It was evident even in his self-deprecating amusement at warnings that a future President Mélenchon would bring disaster. “They announce that my winning the election would bring nuclear winter, a plague of frogs, Red Army tanks and the landing of the Venezuelans,” he blogged, adding it “makes me laugh”.

Perhaps this was what charmed the voters. That and a fiery silver tongue that has made Mélenchon rallies – even those of more than three hours – textbook examples of the power of good oration.

This month a poll declared the leader of La France Insoumise (France Unbowed) the country’s favourite politician. It was still no guarantee they would go out and vote for him. Ultimately they did – but only about 19% of them. He initially refused to concede, preferring to wait for the final results.

In the past fortnight, as his popularity in the polls rose, Mélenchon appeared to wake up to the fact that he was really in the running and softened some of the more divisive elements of his manifesto.



A threat to tax anyone earning more than €400,000 (£335,000) at 100% was dropped to 90%; France’s relationship with the EU would be “renegotiated” not ruptured; he was absolutely not “extreme left”, he insisted. Mélenchon even managed to appear at seven campaign rallies at once, a deft use of projection technology that, if not quite all smoke and mirrors, was certainly all mirrors.

Moroccan-born Mélenchon, a divorced father of one and an intensely private man, lives in Paris’s gritty but increasingly trendy 10th arrondissement and has a second home in Burgundy. (Asset declarations suggested he was, on paper, even better off than the conservative Les Républicains candidate François Fillon who owns a country château.)

After his parents’ divorce, Mélenchon moved from Tangiers to Normandy. He recalls stepping off the boat after it docked, aged 11, with his sister and a pet canary in a cage and the “shock of disillusion” that followed.



“Perhaps it was because people told us so many stories about France and the reality was so different,” he said later. “Imagine, I’d never seen a man drunk in the street.”

At university, Mélenchon studied philosophy, and was a Trotskyist activist before working as a French teacher and a journalist. He signed up to the Socialist party in the 70s and was elected to the Senate in 1986, aged 35, becoming one of the youngest members of the upper house. He left the party in 2011 to form the Parti de Gauche.