SW

His campaign is extremely effective. In the political debates, everybody thought he was the best or tied with Marine le Pen. The way he refused to just come out with rote responses and made jokes at the expense of other candidates was extremely effective. (At one point, Le Pen accused him of talking like a Robespierre, and he fired back that he didn’t take that as an insult.) There is a real dynamic momentum in his campaign at the moment.

However, there are lots of important criticisms that one can make of both his political stance on numerous questions and his modus operandi as a politician. The campaign he is conducting this election is quite different from the campaign he conducted in 2012, for at least one important feature.

In 2012, he was campaigning under the banner of the Left Front. Mélenchon was the presidential candidate of the Front. For this campaign in 2017, he has created a completely new organization called La France Insoumise, “Unbowed France” or “Nonsubmissive France.” He is the candidate of this almost structureless organization.

He has now left behind the Left Party, his own party. This is a much more personalized campaign than in 2012, and this tyranny of structurelessness that he has created reproduces a lot of highly problematic features, namely a campaign focusing on one charismatic figure and a lack of democratic structures for building grassroots organizations.

The campaign is being conducted in a different style as well. That’s not necessarily all bad, but there are some real limitations to his campaign.

The other criticisms one could make are much longer-standing ones of his political perspective. Jean-Luc Mélenchon has described himself as a republican socialist, and he takes that definition very seriously. He identifies the new Sixth Republic he wants to realize and the social project behind him as a kind of continuation of the French republican tradition going back to the French Revolution.

Of course there are lots of positive features about the French republican tradition, but there is also a dark side of complicity in colonialism, in colonial massacres, and the exclusion of all sorts of groups which he doesn’t really face up to.

So there is an idealization of the republican tradition within his political thought, which means, on questions like race and religion, he takes a very abstract universalist position, which seems fine on face value. When you dig deeper, it’s actually a complete refusal to take seriously questions of the racialization of whole populations of North African origin in France, or Islamophobia.

And he is very strongly identified with a laïcité state-secularist position, which he claims is evenhanded against the Catholic Church, Islam, and other religions. But it’s not the Catholic Church that is suffering from oppression — it’s Muslims.

There is a real problem with his very stubborn refusal to take seriously the question of Islamophobia and racism, which is in contrast to how he has progressed on a number of different issues, like ecology, trans issues, and lots of other issues related to what used to be called the new social movements. On Islamophobia, he just refuses to integrate it at all.

And then there is the fact that he identifies with the French state in every aspect. He really sees the French state in its republican form as defending the common interests of humanity. On one philosophical level, this is a sort of extension of the French Revolution’s emancipatory gesture, but it also translates into an identification with the French state in its actual repressive form.

So he’s very complimentary about the police, about the French army, including its role in different military fronts that François Hollande opened up. The grandiosity of his discourse about France being a strong power which needs to assert itself is positive in the sense that he wants it to assert itself independently from the United States, he wants France to pull out from NATO, but there is still identification with what is basically the legacy of French imperialism.

He is quite cautious not to apologize for French colonial crimes. He doesn’t identify with French colonialism, but he doesn’t want to apologize for them, either. He wants to have it both ways.

This identification with the French state, with its power, with its ability to position itself on the world stage and so on, is really quite problematic because it means that he cannot develop an independent left foreign policy that doesn’t take some very bad geopolitical positions, which verge towards apologias for certain regimes.