Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the MEP and founder of the parti de gauche (party of the left), chose tomorrow to stage his "citizens' march for the sixth republic" because it is the 224th anniversary of the estates-general – the beginning of the 1789 revolution.
Mélenchon is the self-styled modern-day incarnation of the revolutionary leader Robespierre. He hopes to mobilise “more than 100,000 people” on – where else? – the Place de la Bastille. The demonstration will be a “show of strength” against President François Hollande and what Mélenchon calls the “government of thieves”.
Mélenchon's march also targets the right, which will hold its own demonstration to protest the legalisation of same-sex marriage and adoption. In an interview with Politis magazine, Mélenchon said the right and extreme-right had taken over the street. The issue of gay marriage, he admitted, "has tipped the balance of power against us".
Tomorrow’s demonstrations will be a way of gauging the strength of opposition to Hollande from left and right. The defection of the left of the left is most worrying for Hollande. Communists have several times voted against socialists in the senate. At least 20 socialists abstained or voted against Hollande’s labour reform in the national assembly. Some prominent greens, including the MEP Eva Joly, are set to march with Mélenchon.
Hatred of the rich
Mélenchon has never been convinced by Hollande's sporadic sorties against "the world of finance" and French millionaires.
Hollande, he says “neither sees nor hears the suffering of citizens”. Mélenchon embodies the hatred of the rich so prevalent at the moment. “You are going to pay, ladies and gentlemen, the rich,” he said during last year’s presidential campaign, when he won 11 per cent of the vote.
When President Hugo Chávez died in March, the parti de gauche headquarters were decked with Venezuelan flags and burning candles. "What Chávez is never dies," Mélenchon said. "He is the inexhaustible ideal of humanist hope, of revolution." Chávez's successor, Nicolas Maduro, this week told Le Monde newspaper that "Mélenchon is our great friend, our comrade".
Mélenchon denounced the finance ministers of the euro group who voted to tax Cypriot bank deposits as “17 bastards”. He accused French finance minister Pierre Moscovici of “behaving like someone who doesn’t think in French anymore, who thinks in the language of international finance”. The remark was interpreted as anti-Semitic. Mélenchon claimed he did not know that Moscovici was Jewish.
French politics needs “a big sweep of the broom”, he says. Some of the supporters who will be bused in tomorrow will carry brooms. Mélenchon, who is prone to paranoia, says he’ll bring pyjamas and a toothbrush in case he’s arrested.
