France Insoumise leader to call on Corbyn to join global club of leftist movements as part of a new ‘era of the people’

The French hard-left leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon is to appear at a Labour party conference event for the first time, inviting Jeremy Corbyn to join a world club of leftist movements.

In his office at the French parliament before travelling to Liverpool, Mélenchon told the Guardian he sought to invite Corbyn to join an international club for like-minded movements. “I have a proposal to create a world club, a joint common space for parties and movements from different countries, including Africa and Asia,” he said.

Mélenchon, who heads the grassroots-led leftist movement, France Insoumise, or France Unbowed, won an unprecedented 19.5% in the first round of last year’s French presidential election and has positioned his parliamentary group as key opponents to Emmanuel Macron. He accuses the centrist, pro-business president of shrinking the state and dismantling public services. In turn, members of Macron’s party have accused Mélenchon of populism.

The leftist philosopher-orator famous for his firebrand speeches, has described France Unbowed as a “citizens’ revolution”. He will be a keynote speaker at The World Transformed fringe event in Liverpool on Monday night, discussing what he calls a new “era of the people” and is expected to meet Corbyn privately for the first time.

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At 67, two years younger than Corbyn, Mélenchon said he saw parallels with the Labour leader’s support base, including the structures of a mass movement and “the paradox of an older man representing a cause that has been powered by millions of young people”. He said it was striking that in UK and France – and with Bernie Sanders in the US – these were older leaders “in some areas seen as caricatures of a certain left and yet we’re also seen as representing something fundamentally different and new”.

While Corbyn’s career was inside the Labour party, Mélenchon, a former Trotskyist who began politics as a student activist in the May 1968 movement, spent more than 30 years in the French Socialist party as a senator, a junior minister and was close to the president François Mitterrand, before quitting in 2008, criticising what he called the party’s rightwards shift.

Mélenchon said he was not coming to Liverpool with advice for Corbyn but rather to “watch and learn”. He said: “The first of us who wins will be right. We absolutely need a victory that reverses the path of decline that history seems to have taken, where capitalism is triumphant and incapable of doing the minimum to protect people, incapable of handling the financial sphere or climate change. We need a country to reverse that.”

Mélenchon said grassroots movements should build on the universal feeling that voters had had enough with ruling elites. “The whole of Europe is in thrall to a wave of ‘dégagisme’ – the desire to kick out a ruling political elite,” he said. He felt the UK’s vote for Brexit was an expression of that.

Mélenchon, who championed France’s no vote in the 2005 referendum on the European constitution and who insists on a total renegotiation of what he sees as the EU’s dangerously neoliberal treaties, said he was watching Brexit closely.

He said: “The British have a long history of independence and self-determination. They are a rebel people. I think in British collective memory, their extraordinary resistance to Nazism created a great pride and assurance, a self-confidence. The EU managed to make itself odious to the British, just like it has to other people in Europe.

“The extraordinary thing is that Britain has a strong culture of democracy, so there was a vote ... I think the leaders hadn’t predicted that the people would respond by voting for Brexit. But they aren’t the only leaders who have been wrong in this area.

“For someone like me, watching from the outside, the question is whether Brexit has fixed any of the problems that interest our kind of political movement. Is the sovereignty of the British people any greater after Brexit than before? For the moment, that’s not clear. But so far it has not changed the status and power of company boardrooms, it hasn’t changed the balance of sharing wealth and the UK hasn’t suddenly become more environmentally-minded than before. So I think the reasons which led the British people to reject the European Union will still be present in the everyday reality of the UK.

“We’d be wrong to think that British voters’ concerns were simply focused on the country’s relationship to the EU. I think it was also about the relationship to a world that British people have just as much difficulty with as people in France: the financial economy, capitalism without a cause, the end of industry.”

Mélenchon said he would continue opposing Macron at home, describing France Unbowed as “the grain of sand that is blocking the machine” of Macron’s proposed overhaul of welfare and labour policies.

Asked if he was a populist, Mélenchon said: “For the moment, that word is often used as an accusation by those who fear the people and hate them. And to be clear, there are so many things that can be called populism that the word itself no longer means anything in particular. I don’t fight over words, I fight for reality. The reality is: who has the people with them? Some members of my movement use the word populist. I don’t use it, I create other political concepts and criteria.”

Asked about accusations of antisemitism levelled against Corbyn, Mélenchon said: “I don’t believe it. He belongs to a humanist tradition, which is incompatible with antisemitism.”