Ten Years of France Insoumise: a Marxist view

In February 2026, La France Insoumise (LFI), “France in Revolt”, the largest organisation of the radical left in France, will be ten years old. Yet, in-depth Marxist writings on its nature and prospects, particularly those published in English, have been very few.1 This article aims to show what is specific about the party and give a view on how revolutionaries should engage with the movement. There are two other reasons that this article might be timely. Firstly, in Britain, the new radical left party around Zarah Sultana and Jeremy Corbyn has opened up questions about what sort of principled alliances are healthy and useful. Secondly, for the first time, one of Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s major books has been published in English this year and so LFI’s project is being discussed more frequently among anglophone activists.2

I will first look at the influence and activity of LFI in 2025, and its usefulness to the working class, before retracing the history of its ideas and organisation. Then I will look at immediate and medium-term weaknesses of LFI ideas and strategies. I will consider that it goes without saying that revolutionary Marxists must maintain their own analyses, voices, organisations and initiatives, and not dissolve all their activity into any such movement. Finally, I will look at how the revolutionary left in France has interacted with LFI, and the serious mistakes I believe are being made.

Reformism and/or revolution

The latest book by Mélenchon, the most influential leader of LFI, is entitled Now, the People: Revolution in the Twenty First Century. LFI documents frequently speak of “a citizens’ revolution” and “spectacular change”.3 Mathilde Panot quoted Rosa Luxemburg in the closing meeting of the 2025 summer school while the analyses of Karl Marx on capitalism are taught and discussed in LFI educational events.4 Further, a call for an insurgent people is common in leaders’ speeches. In August 2024, Mélenchon explained that when a LFI government is formed, the job of activists will not be to obey but “to be in revolt everywhere, all the time”.5

Despite this, we have to see LFI principally as “new reformists”. This is not an insult, but the application of a Marxist category. The central strategy of the LFI leadership is to transform France by winning elections, changing the constitution radically to reduce presidential power and increase people’s democratic rights, and using the powers of the state to further the interests of the masses. In this way, they intend to sharply turn economy and society towards the protection of our planet and the social wellbeing of citizens, and away from the dictatorship of profit and speculation. The stated objective is not to dismantle existing state institutions, disband the police and army and build new structures of workers’ democracy based on the workplaces, as we revolutionary Marxists tend to recommend. The LFI programme includes, for example, a section on “Restructuring the Police Force to Uphold Republican Principles”. Its economic programme explains the need for the establishment of powerful public banks, but not for expropriating existing banks. Elements of left Keynesianism—the idea of relaunching the economy through government investment—are central to LFI’s policies.6

There are, nevertheless, a number of crucial points to be added to this initial characterisation. The first is that this important categorisation is one which is available to Marxists and not to the mass of French workers. Very large numbers of people favourable to LFI or firmly opposed to LFI consider its project to be revolutionary. There is absolutely no general understanding in the French working class that there might be any difference between “a citizens’ revolution” and “a workers’ revolution”. This fact must guide the attitude of all revolutionary activists. Remaining loudly distant from people who are demanding revolutionary change, using the excuse that we want a different kind of revolution, is not good strategy.

Secondly, if the dominant solution proposed by the organisation’s leadership would fit alongside a reconfigured version of the existing state machine, LFI is still very different from mainstream reformism. It has gained its complete organisational independence from those parties with a past in government and in managing austerity. Its leaders do not suggest people should stop fighting and wait for the next elections: LFI generally supports popular revolt. In his speech at the 2025 summer school, Mélenchon called for a general strike on 10 September this year. He has also called on young people to join active antifascist organisations such as the Jeune Garde Antifasciste (Antifascist Young Guard), an organisation banned by Emmanuel Macron in March 2024. Mélenchon declared “these young people hate fascism. I say they are right. Well done, continue like that! The Minister of the Interior is trying to frighten us—[he] will never succeed!”.7

As I write, in late 2025, LFI local groups are very much involved in building strikes and blockading actions, while one of the younger LFI members of parliament, Louis Boyard, has called on high school students to blockade their places of study.8 In June 2025, Mélenchon’s speech at a national demonstration ended “Long live struggle! Struggle is the only thing which keeps us alive and standing up!”.9

On the level of theory too, the idea of breaking with traditional reformism is very much present. Three quotations from Mélenchon’s latest book will suffice to illustrate this. On the present situation, he explains that “[c]apitalism is inherently anti-ecological, and today neoliberalism is driven ever further into an authoritarian spiral”.10 On changing society, he declares “We are not talking about a patch-up job, but a change from this civilisation to a different one”.11 On the attitude required to rebel effectively, he tells us, “[t]oday, being an anti-capitalist is a precondition simply to make reasonable preparations for humanity’s survival”.12

This radicality attracts millions and is a real sign of hope. It would be hopelessly sectarian for revolutionaries to see LFI first and foremost as unwelcome competition, an organisation to be caught out with “gotcha” articles brashly denouncing specific tactical decisions without putting together a general understanding of LFI’s strengths and weaknesses.13

Influence and activity today

So, how influential is LFI today, and how useful is it to workers and the oppressed in the building of combativity, confidence and consciousness? Let us look first at votes. The LFI candidate Mélenchon got 7.7 million votes in the presidential election of 2022.14 That was a rise from 7.1 million in 2017, even though in 2022 (but not in 2017) the Communist Party fielded a candidate against him.15 Working-class people were stronger supporters of LFI than others. In 2022, Mélenchon obtained 21.95 percent overall and won the support of 28 percent of voters from really poor households.16 Twenty-seven percent of blue-collar workers chose LFI and 25 percent of white-collar workers. Mélenchon got more than 30 percent of voters under 34, and did particularly well in the larger cities (Montpellier and Lille over 40 percent, Toulouse 37 percent, Lyon and Marseille 31 percent, Paris 30 percent).17 Fully 69 percent of French Muslim voters chose Mélenchon, confirming his role as the first well-known national politician to take the fight against Islamophobia seriously, in the most Islamophobic country in Western Europe.

In 2017, the FI had 17 members of parliament in the National Assembly. Today, there are 72 (and 9 Euro MPs). The vast majority were new to political office, and many were recruited because of their role leading local protest movements or trade union struggles. Let me mention just a few. Euro MP Anne Sophie Pelletier had previously been the spokeswoman for a strike in care homes. Farida Amrani first made her mark as a local government trade unionist, Jean-Hugues Ratenon first organised against poverty in Reunion Island, Muriel Ressiguier began in a national antifascist campaign, Sébastien Delogu was spokesperson for an important taxi drivers’ strike in Marseille, Rachel Kéké led strikes of hotel cleaning staff. Alma Dufour was a leader of Friends of the Earth, Martine Etienne was a union activist in the Post Office for many years, while Abdelkhader Lahmar was an activist against police racism. The general profile is one of active class fighters, and certainly nobody’s yes-men or yes-women.

What about the LFI programme? It takes into account the seriousness of the climate emergency and insists on the need for a radical transformation of society—100 percent renewable energy and 100 percent organic farming count among the proposals. It proposes that a maximum salary be imposed by the government in each company, and that the minimum wage be raised sharply, while all wages should be indexed to inflation. Maximum inheritance is to be limited by law. Price freezes on basic food products are proposed, and free basic amounts of water and electricity for every household. Crèches are to be free. The full (crowd-sourced) programme includes 831 measures, far too many to list here.18 This is obviously not a revolutionary Marxist programme, but equally obviously it is an exciting programme that inspires millions of French workers frustrated by the dictatorship of profit.

Constitutional change

An important objective of LFI is to found a “Sixth Republic”. The present French constitution (which gives huge powers to the president) is that of the Fifth Republic, put together under the supervision of general Charles de Gaulle in 1958. The LFI project for a new constitution attracts a level of support in France difficult to imagine for people in countries such as Britain, where constitutions are generally considered so boring there is no point in having one. In 2017, 100,000 people marched in Paris under the slogan “For a Sixth Republic!”. If an LFI candidate is elected president, they promise to call a constituent assembly to write a new constitution. The meaning of this proposal for constitutional change is hard to assess precisely, but it is a sign of how the organisation wants to foreground its determination to break with (neoliberal) business as usual.

Local elections, educationals

The next elections should be the local elections in March 2026. At the last ones, in 2020, only 45 percent of the electorate voted, so LFI networks are hoping to mobilise the abstainers through mass door-to-door canvassing in particular, as they successfully did for the legislatives.19 LFI has already hit the headlines with its proposal to reverse privatisation of water supply and to disarm municipal police forces.20 At the 2025 LFI summer school, a series of discussions covered the experience of left councils in the 20th century and today.

Although LFI does not have the development and debate on theory that we have in revolutionary Marxist organisations, ideas are taken seriously, as is the development of leadership. The national LFI educational scheme, the La Boétie Institute, sets up regular lectures and conferences.21 Recently, there were events on “The Double Exploitation of Women”, “The Length of the Working Week Since the 14th Century”, “How the State Serves the Market” and “What Strategy can Defeat the Far Right”. In addition to the audience on site, these lectures got between 5,000 and 15,000 views on YouTube.22

The LFI summer school in August 2025 attracted nearly 5,000 participants.23 The meeting rooms carried the names of revolutionary women and men, mostly from the French Revolution, Haitian Revolution, and 19th-century socialist movements.24 Meetings included “Historical Materialism”, “Capitalism According to Karl Marx”, “Capitalism and Exploitation Today”, “Fighting Islamophobia”, training workshops on speaking in public and on graphic skills, and debates and lectures concerning practically all the key political questions of today, including secularism, feminism, homophobia and transphobia, antifascism, police violence and animal rights. Moreover, 550 activists under 26 attended a youth camp a few days earlier. It should nevertheless be noted that, although there were many meetings on international and anticolonial issues (Kanaky, Mercosur, the conflict between China and the United States, and so on), the words “French imperialism” appear nowhere in the programme. We will come back to this below.

Regular cadre schools for activists take place, generally consisting of a series of eight weekend courses, organised around the themes “on materialism, on the ‘age of the people’ and on global humanism”.25 Some effort is made to include people from working-class backgrounds (of the 70 people of the last participating group, 45 percent had not been to university).

Parliamentary work

The action in parliament of the 71 MPs is intended both to show the capacity of the organisation to govern the country and also to serve as mass political education, given the wide media coverage of parliamentary debates. Parliamentary courtesy is thrown aside. In May 2024, LFI MP Sebastien Delogu was suspended for waving a Palestinian flag during debates; LFI MPs have shown in parliament documentaries on the genocide in Gaza, and demanded a minute’s silence for victims of racist murders by the police. In 2017, when Macron’s government reduced housing benefit by €5 (£4.40) a month, and dismissed the idea that this might matter to people, Mélenchon came to the assembly with a bag of groceries to show what can be bought by poor families with such a sum. All these actions help reinforce the idea that neoliberal reaction is not inevitable.

Elections are central to LFI’s strategy, and this is one of the things that makes the movement popular. People see that elections change things. Trump gets elected: things get rapidly worse. My town near Paris, Montreuil, elected a Communist mayor who builds council housing. Other towns around Paris, like Neuilly or Boulogne-Billancourt, with Conservative mayors, do not. It is a long time since major reforms for our class have been instituted by a government in France, but people remember reforms such as retirement at 60 (1981), the 35-hour week (2002) or the right for gays and lesbians to marry (2013), and they hope elections might bring real change.

This hope is no doubt even stronger after the magnificent strike movement of 2023, which failed to stop Macron from raising the retirement age by two years.26 Interest in electoral movements often rises after other movements do not succeed, and this tendency is strengthened by the fact that the left in France, including the revolutionary left, is not clear on the reasons for the defeat of 2023.27

Workers are also seeing clearly that elections can serve to temporarily brake the vicious drift to reaction. In 2024, the pressure from below for a united left electoral front was absolutely overwhelming. All the opinion polls without exception predicted a fascist government, and the fact that the fascists finally came third in a number of seats constituted a crucial tactical victory, distancing, for a while, Le Pen’s National Rally from the prospect of power.

However, LFI has also gained much support for its activity on dozens of issues that are not directly connected to legislative activity. I would like to concentrate on three issues that are litmus tests for radical left organisations, subjects where establishment pressure is such that many organisations rush to toe the line: Palestine, police violence and Islamophobia.

Palestine, police violence and Islamophobia

LFI representatives have used their position to mobilise against the genocide.28 LFI Euro MP Rima Hassan was the only elected representative on board the Madleen alongside activists and journalists in June 2025. The follow-up freedom flotilla in September counted a number of LFI leaders—including Thomas Portes (39-year-old railway worker and member of parliament), Emma Fourreau (25-year-old Euro MP and green activist) and Marie Mesmur (31-year-old MP). LFI groups everywhere in France are active in the Palestine movement.

Police violence is an issue that generally pulls reformist forces into line, so it was refreshing to hear the reactions of LFI leaders when rebellion spread across France’s working-class suburbs in response to yet another racist police murder caught on video, that of Nahel Merzouk, in 2023.29 LFI insisted speaking of a “revolt” and not of “riots”. Mélenchon declared: “The [media] guard dogs [of the establishment] are ordering us to call for calm. We call for justice!… Suspend the police murderer”.30 LFI MPs and action groups have been involved in campaigns against police violence in their towns.

Islamophobia, as many readers of this journal will be aware, has been even more central to government strategies in France than elsewhere. In recent years, ministers have claimed French universities are dominated by “Islamo-leftists” or have insisted that high-school students wearing North African tunics are part of an infiltrating fifth column. Huge pressure is put on sporting organisations to make sure women who wear a hijab are banned from participating. The right wing has put Islamophobia front and centre because the left, including the far left, has been so catastrophically poor on this issue.31 Last year, almost nobody protested when French hijab-wearing athletes were banned during the Olympics.

Determined work over decades by Muslim activists and allies has obliged the French radical and revolutionary left to make slow progress on this question. So, whereas in 2010, the New Anticapitalist Party’s newspaper referred to women who wear a niqab as “birds of death” in an editorial, and, only six years ago, the LFI summer school invited an “expert” on secularism who insisted he had “the right to be Islamophobic”, both organisations have moved forward.32 Today, LFI is generally seen as the party of enthusiastic opposition to Islamophobia. Mélenchon’s keynote speech at the 2025 summer school put the question front and centre: “The heart of the struggle is to refuse racism and Islamophobia, which are just the system’s tools to dominate us…whatever your neighbour’s religion is, you have the same interests”.33 No other public figure of similar stature in France has ever done this. Clearly, further progress is necessary. LFI is still divided, for example, concerning the abrogation of the racist 2004 law that bans Muslim headscarves for high school students.

One idea put forward by Mélenchon as a response to institutional racism is that of “creolisation”—the idea (adapted from that of Edouard Glissant, a black French philosopher from Martinique) that the new France is made up of a rich multiethnic mix that should be celebrated and can be the basis of a new unity. From the point of view of working-class politics, the question is not so much whether this viewpoint is beyond reproach (it needs to be debated), it is to note how much progress it represents compared with the traditional assimilationist and Islamophobic philosophies that have dominated the French left for many decades.

History of LFI ideas

The eclectic mix of ideas behind LFI has been developed by Mélenchon and close allies over the last 40 years.34 Mélenchon joined the revived Parti Socialiste (Socialist Party, PS) as a student, when it was re-founded in the early 1970s; for some time, he participated in a Trotskyist grouping but was rapidly disillusioned with small-group politics. The atmosphere in the PS at this time was symbolised by the declaration of its new leader François Mitterrand: “Those who do not wish to break with the established order, with capitalist society, cannot be members of the Socialist Party”.35 Mélenchon was inspired by the LIP workers’ occupation in the early 1970s and by the Portuguese revolution of 1974. For a time, he was a member of the Chilean Revolutionary Left Movement but was demoralised by the military coup in 1973.

The Communist Party, still very powerful, did not attract him. It was slow to embrace or learn from the new social movements (student revolt, feminist and environmental activism, anti-racist currents). When Solidarność in Poland inspired those who really wanted change, the French Communist leadership were very negative about it and cautiously supported the martial law declaration of 1981.

Inside the PS, after the turn towards austerity of the Mitterrand governments, Mélenchon organised a left-wing current. He became a senator and was later a junior minister for two years. At the time of the 2005 referendum on a neoliberal constitution for the European Union, he broke away from official PS policy to the left, and finally left the party in 2008. The most visible options using the ideas of Marxism did not attract him. The Communist Party waved the hammer and sickle but became less and less radical with each year that passed. The Trotskyist groups in France seemed small and sectarian. Mélenchon’s political development is that of an activist intellectual in a country where the traditions of active Marxists had some merit but were very much flawed.36

He thought something new was required. It has often been noted that he borrowed several key ideas from the “left populism” of Belgian academic Chantal Mouffe.37 Many have overemphasised this debt: in a long-filmed conversation with Mouffe, available on YouTube, the two thinkers seem to have as many differences as similarities.38 Mélenchon has also often underlined his debt to sections of the South American left.

His newly formed Parti de Gauche (Left Party), founded in 2009, never became a mass force. However, after different experiences of electoral alliances across the radical left, LFI has become the centre of gravity of left politics in France.39 LFI has invented a new symbolism—using not the hammer and sickle, but the Greek letter Phi, speaking of the people, not the proletariat; they speak of “rebels” (les insoumis) rather than “socialists”. The relative success of these innovations was facilitated by the negative connotations of the hammer and sickle and of the word “socialism” to radicals in France. However, the fundamental explanation for LFI’s meteoric rise is elsewhere. As I wrote in International Socialism 185:

Its emergence is the result of two phenomena. There is the generalisation of political class consciousness in France after the mass political strikes of 1995, 2006, 2010, 2013, 2019 and 2023 (against attacks on pensions or on labour protection legislation) and the popular revolts of 2005, 2018 and 2024 (against police violence or rural poverty). Then, there is the weakness and division of the Marxist left, which was unable to recruit massively from this rising consciousness.40

Today, apart from having a series of talented speakers, including Manon Aubry and in particular Mélenchon himself, LFI has a dynamism and youth that are very valuable.41 It can popularise punchy slogans, such as “Macron and Le Pen—a Duet, Not a Duel!”. Its key talent, however, is in listening to and recruiting from the explosive movements that the crisis in French society regularly throws up: the Yellow Vests, the movement against police violence or the left Muslim networks.

Marxist analysis is not about giving marks out of ten to different left political organisations but about grasping their usefulness and potential. I have explained how LFI has been useful to workers consciousness and left organisation, and I will later share my thoughts on the opportunities opened up for Marxists. Before that, I must look at some of the weaknesses of LFI ideas and practices.

People or proletariat?

The theory of social change put forward by Mélenchon and other LFI leaders is based on their impression that revolutionary Marxism has not worked—the Leninist version is generally seen as having degenerated into Stalinism, the Trotskyist version into sectarian irrelevancy. Along with many readers of this journal, I do not agree. A theory for spectacular change attracting millions, however, deserves serious consideration and debate, in particular when it has built a powerful movement that is so useful for workers and for the oppressed.

The first question to debate is the choice of appealing to “the people” rather than to “the workers”. In 2023, when we saw millions of people on the streets to oppose the raising of the pension age and LFI, with an audience of tens of millions, was arguing that “the people” need to blockade the country until this attack was abandoned, it would rightly have been considered sectarian if the Marxists, with an audience many times smaller, were concentrating on denouncing the use of the term “people” rather than “working class”. As a term used in a slogan, “people” is a relatively harmless variant.42

As a term of analysis of capitalist society, though, it is problematic. The idea of the “working class” emphasises that the power of the exploited is above all present in the workplace, where the essence of the system, profit, is produced. This is notably the case in moments of crisis: what terrified the rulers of France in 1968 was, fundamentally, not so much the huge student movement but the ten million strikers.

Moreover, when debate turns to foreign policy, the exclusive use of the idea of “the people” has very serious drawbacks. When we speak of domestic politics, the “people” can be active on the streets, on strike, and they can be seen in various other sites of resistance. However, on the international stage, the LFI leadership’s idea of the actor who might be able to improve things radically is the French state. LFI declarations on French foreign policy can be excellent: when, in 2023, Niger threw the French military out of its country, Mélenchon was almost alone on TV to say that the Niger government were the ones who had the right to decide. The problem is that the better future that is proposed is one where the French state would lead peace and justice initiatives around the world, using its power for good. Obviously, we Marxists do not see this as realistic. LFI leaders have played a good role in broadcasting demands from progressive movements in the overseas departments and territories, such as Mayotte or Kanaky, but LFI does not openly campaign against French imperialism. For example, the intervention in Mali from 2013-2022, led by France was presented as “a mistake”, and a United Nations intervention was presented as the solution.43

This weakness on internationalism is even more visible if one looks at Mélenchon’s support for keeping French nuclear weapons. Interviewed in 2020, he explained:

Deterrence remains an irreplaceable tool for France as long as there are no military alternatives…there can be no question of asking the French to disarm first. It must be those who have the most nuclear weapons who start, namely the United States and Russia.44

Although he has backtracked somewhat on this recently, this is a very important disagreement.

Left patriotism

Mélenchon and the LFI leadership often defend a form of left patriotism. It is very different from right-wing nationalism but still problematic. On the one hand, when Le Pen is saying that the true French tradition is Judaeo-Christian and other fascists are squealing about “the Arabs” invading and planning to replace the “true French”, and LFI is replying that the real French tradition is 1789, 1936, and 1968, and that the time has come to take the national motto of “liberty, equality and brotherhood” seriously, it would be a grave mistake to suggest the two discourses are in some way equivalent.45 Certainly, it is true that a national anthem (The Marseillaise) that demands that our fields be irrigated with aristocratic blood, which calls citizens to arm themselves against tyranny and which was a popular song both with the Paris Commune and the antifascist resistance against Vichy, obviously does not have identical symbolic effects to dirges like God Save the King.

Nevertheless, left patriotism is rightly opposed by Marxists. The use of symbols of the 1789 French Revolution should not be our main worry: that should rather be the explanation of where our class interests lie. Are workers in France supposed to be pleased when a French company wins a major contract over foreign competition? In 2021, when Australia cancelled an order for war submarines constructed in France, and opted to buy them elsewhere, Mélenchon denounced Macron for “capitulating” and betraying France.46 Such positions make ideas of international common interests between peoples and between workers far harder to defend.

Can a left government bring radical change?

Obviously, one of the biggest points of contention between revolutionary Marxists and defenders of a “citizens’ revolution” concerns the limits of what a left government can achieve, given the spectacular pressure the ruling class can turn on it. The capitulation of the Syriza government in Greece in 2015, the experience of the François Mitterrand governments in France in the 1980s or that of Harold Wilson in Britain in the 1960s are just a few of very numerous examples of negative final outcomes.47 Discussions about this problem go on inside LFI, but often with little input from Marxists.

Mélenchon has produced lectures on the Mitterrand experience of the 1980s, one of them entitled “The Revolution Suspended”.48 He explains in detail his view on what Mitterrand’s left government was able to do, why it changed course, and how a future left government could be immeasurably more successful in bringing radical change. These interventions might have been the basis of an extremely fruitful debate with revolutionary Marxists in France, but, as I will show below, simply dismissing serious debate with left reformists has been the most common far-left attitude.

Finally, let us look at the fight against fascism, obviously a crucial issue. LFI is campaigning daily to discredit ideas and practises of the fascist Rassemblement National (National Rally, RN), showing them to be deadly enemies of the poor and the oppressed. LFI sadly does not recognise, though, the need for a national campaign of mass direct action to stop fascists meeting or marching or building. In this, it has the same weak position as the vast majority of Marxist groups in the country.

Structure and democracy

No doubt the most important step forward made by LFI is its complete organisational independence from the traditional left party of government, the PS. However, the structure of the organisation is also very particular as LFI leaders decided the organisation should be founded as a movement not a party, without formal membership. There were a number of reasons for this. Firstly, the umbrella Front de gauche (Left Front) alliance, founded in 2008 to bring together parties, groups and individuals, was paralysed by internal conflict. Secondly, there was the negative attitude to political parties within many French social movements, and thirdly, the LFI leadership aimed to avoid the endless conflict between permanent factions, endemic in many left groups in France, both inside the PS and in those groups close to the Fourth International.49 Finally, the LFI leadership considered that the rise of new technology allows many things to be done online that previously needed a party apparatus.

Rather than party branches, LFI has a couple of thousand local Action Groups, which have a large measure of autonomy. My local group in Montreuil, just outside Paris, has been pressuring the Communist mayor to display a Palestine flag on the town hall, supporting local government strikers, campaigning for Macron to resign or be impeached, and preparing local elections, as well as being involved in activities that are traditional for left reformists in France: collecting for foodbanks or collecting donations of back-to-school equipment for poorer families, organising “know-your-rights” caravans and so on. In late 2025, as I write these lines, groups around the country are setting up public meetings on Palestine, collections of school supplies for kids, organising voter registration drives, flyposting or leafletting for the “Block everything” movement or door-to-door canvassing. Although parliamentary activity is considered extremely important by the LFI leadership, and publicising the many causes they defend in parliament is a priority, campaigning is very much part of the DNA of LFI action groups.

LFI has been much criticised on the left for not organising a traditional party with factional rights, regional conferences and elected national committees. Certainly, the public face of the movement is dominated by its members of parliament, though local action groups have a lot of freedom concerning what campaigns to prioritise. The movement has regular national conferences attended by supporters chosen by lot, and crowdsourced pamphlets on a couple of dozen major issues. Decisions by consensus rather than voting are the norm, with the manifesto/programme considered as the glue holding the movement together.

It does not seem to me to be excessively useful for revolutionaries in France to spend too much of our time describing in detail how we would organise a mass party if we were a hundred times more influential than we are. There are obvious downsides to a lack of party structure but there are many advantages too, in particular for revolutionaries. Anyone can participate while at the same time being a member of another left political organisation, producing independent publications, having whatever meetings seem useful, and so on. There are active LFI people who are in the Communist Party or in far-left groups.

Strategies of revolutionaries

How have organised Marxists reacted to all this?50 The general attitude of the far left in France has been to see LFI as unwelcome competition. Far-left groups are willing to work with LFI in specific campaigns and even occasional electoral alliances, but reviewing Mélenchon’s books, writing balanced pieces that are not “gotcha” articles or organising debates with representatives of LFI, is extremely rare.51 The excellent radical left bookshop close to the Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste (New Anticapitalist Party) in Paris regularly invites people to present books or ideas. I have found no trace of an LFI personality ever being invited. Two smallish organisations, the Parti Communiste Révolutionnaire (Revolutionary Communist Party) and the Gauche Révolutionnaire (Revolutionary Left), are the exception, and work very close to or within LFI networks.52

One of the tiny number of analytical articles on LFI published in the paper of the NPA, Anticapitaliste, in 2023, has the title “with feet of clay” and repeats the right-wing nonsense that Mélenchon’s “personality” is at the centre of LFI.53 Philippe Poutou, presidential candidate for the NPA even at one point joined the smear campaign against LFI, suggesting Mélenchon was a careerist and in favour of Putin.54 Lutte Ouvrière (Workers’ Struggle) explains that LFI is opposed to workers’ interests.55 Other left critics denounce in very vague terms Mélenchon’s style of leadership or his personality.56

Standing against LFI

In 2017, and in 2022, two far-left candidates stood in the presidential elections against Mélenchon. Philippe Poutou of the NPA stood in 2022 under the slogan “Anticapitalist Emergency! Our Lives Are Worth More than Their Profits!”. Mélenchon was using the slogan “Another World Is Possible!”. Nathalie Arthaud, for Lutte Ouvrière, stood under the slogan “The Workers’ Camp!”, while Fabien Roussel, the Communist candidate, went for the slogan “The France of Happier Days.”

This decision of revolutionaries to stand against an insurgent left movement headed by Mélenchon could only strengthen sectarian tendencies. The differences between Poutou’s candidacy and Mélenchon’s were very difficult to see for ordinary people, since Poutou’s posters and leaflets headlined on very similar reforms to those proposed by Mélenchon.57 The outcome was that Poutou won 270,000 votes, and the diversion of the NPA’s considerable activist energy away from the principal challenge to the status quo was deeply damaging.58

Smear campaign

Unsurprisingly, Mélenchon has regularly been the target of vicious smear campaigns. He has been accused, by the right-wing media and by people in or close to the PS, of being antisemitic, in favour of terrorism, being xenophobic, a friend of Vladimir Putin and other such things. The far left in France, with occasional honourable exceptions, has refused to put any energy at all into defending Mélenchon against these allegations.59 In a sense, there have been two smear campaigns: the second one came from the left, claiming that LFI only existed to serve Mélenchon’s ego and career.

International Socialism has not so far published any detailed discussions on LFI. Charlie Kimber’s piece in the journal in 2023 gave a good account of the explosion in workers’ struggle and the role of the union bureaucracy but did not deal with the political organisations of the radical left.60 Joseph Choonara’s useful critical survey of revolutionary left approaches to new left reformism concentrated on Greece, Spain and Germany. 61 Denis Godard’s piece in this journal in 2025 does not mention LFI at all.

In the early days of the movement, Vanina Giuidicelli, a member of the Autonomie de Classe (Class Autonomy) group, was interviewed in this journal. She was sceptical about the future of LFI. Speaking of the large number of people who had mobilised behind the programme of LFI in the presidential campaign, she said:

Mélenchon hasn’t particularly given them any propositions for getting organised. He completely dissolved the political organisation behind his campaign, La France Insoumise or France Unbowed. He so personalised this campaign around himself that it’s actually struggled in the parliamentary elections.62

This analysis was wrong. On the contrary, LFI soon introduced a more formal leadership structure, and set up the fairly autonomous action groups across the country, of which there are now thousands. In the first round of the parliamentary elections that year, LFI got two and a half million votes, a significant rise on previous elections, and the beginning of real progress (in the 2022 parliamentary elections, LFI obtained nearly 6 million votes, and in 2024, within a broader alliance, 9 million).

In general, discussions in France on the far left about LFI have produced enough straw men to supply a whole stable of thoroughbreds. Ridiculous caricatures abound. Mélenchon is presented as some sort of megalomaniac careerist, when one of the most notable aspects of his work in LFI has been the immense energy he has put into recruiting and training younger leaders, often people thrown into political responsibility by social movements Rima Hassan, Mathilde Panot, Danièle Obono, Emma Fourreau, Marina Mesure, Sébastien Délogu, Ugo Bernalicis and Thomas Portes are names which spring to mind. The average age of LFI members of parliament today is 43, five years younger than the average for the whole parliament, and ten years younger than the average for PS MPs.63 The huge final rally of the 2025 summer school was not addressed by Mélenchon but by younger leaders.

Conclusion

To summarise, we have a tremendously high level of defensive class consciousness in France, an insurgent, radical, mass political organisation that allows dual membership and other freedoms, that takes ideas seriously and that has emerged at a time when ideological confusion across society is the rule rather than the exception. That is to say, fundamentally, it is Christmas come early for revolutionaries! The deepening of the crisis around the world throws up new mass movements, like the Yellow Vests or LFI in France or Your Party in Britain. We need to throw ourselves into these milieux and not be satisfied with business as usual.

Many readers of this journal, like myself, are convinced that a mass revolutionary party is an essential element to overthrowing capitalism. They will also have noticed that such a party is almost everywhere embryonic at best. How revolutionaries connect with newly radicalised masses is crucial. Personally, given that LFI allows dual membership, I think revolutionaries should join LFI action groups, but even those who feel they have reasons not to do this should put ten or 20 times more effort than currently on working with the organisation and debating with LFI on a dozen questions that have been ignored. We need to be fully involved in an insurgent movement, building trust and networks, while obviously not forgetting the indispensable role of political clarification which is part of our job.

LFI has moved to the left over the last five years—what is its future? 64 Will it get much better or will the radical dynamic be crushed by the innumerable weapons capital has at its disposal? Will it end up as a junior party in a government that capitulates to big capital? Or will the movement be a first step to getting rid of capitalism? The ending is not written in advance. These questions can only be answered in practice, and what revolutionary Marxists say and do will matter.

Much of what I have said is open to debate, and many will feel I have been too generous to LFI. I hope comrades in disagreement will think to send fraternal replies or reactions.

John Mullen is a revolutionary socialist in the Paris region and a supporter of La France Insoumise; his website is www.randombolshevik.org.

Notes