[Breitbart] Leader of the far-left La France Insoumise party Jean-Luc Mélenchon has thrown his hat in the ring for the election to succeed term-limmited President Emmanuel Macron, pitching himself as the candidate of the multicultural "New France".Mélenchon, who is often compared to fellow septuagenarian socialist firebrands Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn, will make his fourth run at the Élysée Palace after falling short in the 2022, 2017, and 2022 races, all of which he failed to advance to the second round. However, his strong 3rd-place finish in 2022 — behind National Rally leader Marine Le Pen and French President Emmanuel Macron — catapulted his LFI (France in Rebellion) party to national prominence and to the forefront of the French far-left.
Leader of the far-left La France Insoumise party Jean-Luc Mélenchon has thrown his hat in the ring for the election to succeed term-limmited President Emmanuel Macron, pitching himself as the candidate of the multicultural "New France".
The Moroccan-born Spanish-Sicilian migrant who moved to France at the age of 11 began his political career just five years later as an activist and student organiser in the Besancon region during the May 1968 uprising, which saw a national leftist revolt led by Marxist university students and trade labour unions against the conservative-leaning De Gaulle government. As a child of the revolution, Mélenchon continues to cite the rebellion as a fundamental moment in his life and has become one of the leading proponents of the movement’s core tenets, including anti-capitalism, anti-imperialism, environmentalism, and socialism.
Although the young radical broke with his Trotskyite comrades to join the Socialist Party where he served as a long-standing ally of former President Francois Mitterrand, whom he praises to this day for his leftist reforms, Mélenchon broke with the Socialists in 2008 to form the Left Party, which he later split from again to form La France Insoumise in 2016. While he later made common cause to form the New Popular Front election coalition with the Socialists and other leftist parties in 2024, perhaps predictably, the alliance has since disintegrated amid persistent infighting among the various left-wing factions.
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